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Health & Fitness

Troubled Relationships at Work: Part I.

Think not rocking the boat with a troubled relationship at work is the best way to go? Think again.

Have you ever worked with a colleague you really didn’t get along with?  Or for a boss with whom you just can’t seem to communicate?  Or a partner with whom you just don’t see eye to eye on anything?  What did you do?  If you’re like most people, your answer is likely to be “I just keep my mouth shut and try not to rock the boat.”  The boat may not be rocking but my guess is that it’s slowly (or not so slowly) taking on water. And if it doesn’t actually sink or capsize, it will at the very least slow you down and make you much less able to get to where you need to go.

Perhaps you have made an attempt to change the relationship and had things blow up in your face and now you’re convinced that troubled relationships are just too risky to address. Think again.  Troubled relationships in business are a lot like troubled marriages.  The parties involved may silently tolerate each other but the ripple effect touches everyone around them.  Think people won’t notice?  Human beings, like many other animals, are surprisingly adept at picking up on the emotions of others and often take on those emotions themselves.  Contrary goals  eat up time and energy of the people in your organization who have to decide whose direction to follow (and whose wrath they will likely incur.)  Departments become siloed and working together for a common goal goes by the wayside. The higher up you are in your organization, the bigger the ripples and the further they will spread. 

If you are ignoring a troubled relationship at work, you have value draining out of your work, your department and your company.  Value that doesn’t require you to buy new equipment, hire more employees or invest in new programs.  The real risk of chronically troubled relationships lies in the cost of non-value added hours for work around plans, redundancies, confusion, trickle down hostilities, complaining and perhaps even lost employees.  All of these things are forms of waste that are very often hidden from view but  rob your company of its rightful profit and ability to be the best it can be.  Eventually, if unaddressed they can cost you not only lost profit but your job or your company.

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The first step in improving a troubled relationship is recognizing the full impact that it’s having and making a commitment to yourself  to resolve it.  What relationships in your work could benefit from improvement? 

Stay tuned for tips on how to start resolving those troubled relationships and improving your results.

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 Til next time.

Beth

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