Ken Tucker - Intentional Relationships: How to Work and Succeed with Others

Copyright 2016 by Ken Tucker

All rights reserved.

Published by Familius LLC, www.familius.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2015955940

Print ISBN 9781942934479

Ebook ISBN 9781944822118

Hardcover ISBN 9781944822125

Printed in the United States of America

Edited by Lindsay Sandberg

Cover design by David Miles

Book design by Brooke Jorden

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Dedication

Relationships fuel not who you have been but who you are becoming.

You are exactly who your relationships demonstrate that you are.

In our fast-paced society, relationship gets left along the way.

These are three lessons my most important relationships have taught merelationships with my wife, Judy; my children, Kendra, Kristen, and Kenny; my children-in-law, Tony and Lizzy; and my grandchildren, Madelyn and James Montgomery.

These same lessons have been reinforced by my colleagues at TAG Consultingthese are the teachers, the influencers whose voices play in my head and heart as I write this book.

My intent is to awaken and reinforce the good and useful lessons about relationships you have learned through your family, friends, and colleagues.

Preface

I study relationships. I am an executive coach; every day my job is to help leaders in industry, government, faith-based communities, healthcare, and education develop and nurture healthy relationships at work and at home. With my colleagues, we collectively have more than one hundred years of experience studying and helping to improve the relationships of thousands of executives, managers, employees, husbands, wives, children, and friends.

We are certified consultants, licensed professionals, practicing hands-on technicians, and, most importantly, learners. With every new assignment and every new client, I start by learning their business, culture, customers, products, and serviceand I assess the health of the relationships that exist within the organization. What I learn about the organization and the relationships therein I use to teach executives, managers, and employees how to increase their relationship effectiveness at work and at home.

In this book, I share a key concept of any relationship that I have learned from studying multiple organizations and coaching hundreds of individuals about relationship: success comes from how those in a relationship choose to behave. The simple and practical premise of this book is: change your behavior and you will change your relationship.

L et me be clear. Relationships are not just romantic relationships. You have a relationship with every person you encounter: a colleague, an employer, a child, a spouse, an in-law, etc. And because we have so many relationships, it is important to make sure that we behave in such a way that maintains healthy relations.

I will use examples Ive seen in my work with building workplace relationships to show you how to change any relationship for the better. These examples become a metaphor for how we each behave with our family, friends, and neighbors. As you read the workplace examples, be thinking of how your personal relationships could benefit from changing your behavior as the people in the stories do.

So How do you behave? is an important questionone this book asks each reader to consider. This books purpose is to teach you how to be the best you can be in all of your relationships. That makes this a how-to book. It is about how to practice relationship in a way that transforms your current relationship with your spouse, siblings, supervisor, subordinates, and friends into an intentional relationship. It is about how to practice relationship in a way that increases connection with your parents, brothers, and sisters. It is about how to develop relationships in a way that increases your effectiveness as a manager. It is about how to facilitate relationships in a way that increases the number of people you work with successfully. It is about how to cultivate relationships with your manager and coworkers in a way that increases the productivity of the team. And it is about how to be the best friend you can be to your friends.

Ho w, then, will this book help you do and be all of this? By doing one thingteaching you how to turn existing relationships into intentional relationships . An intentional relationship is the uplifting use of personality, conversation, insight, opinion, and influence to create and maintain a mutual and selfless connection .

In my last book, Intentional Conversations: How to Rethink Everyday Conversations and Transform Your Career , readers learned how to use conversation in a different and life-impacting way. In this book, you will learn how to behave in ways that reveal the unique and indispensable value you bring to every relationship. Relationship, I believe, is something we do, not something that happens on its own.

So how do you behave now in your relationships?

Are you choosy about your relationshipsas choosy as Google is about who they hire? Google, according to Laszlo Bock in his book Work Rules! , is twenty-five times more selective than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Out of the more than two million who apply for jobs at Google every year, Bock writes, only 15,000 or one out of every 130 people get hired.

Are you spontaneous in your relationshipsas spontaneous as the online shoe supplier Zappos is? Zappos employees are trained to be spontaneous with customers. One famous story is told about a customer calling the Zappos call center thinking they were calling a pizza delivery service. The employee along with the manager proceeded to arrange for a pizza to be delivered by making the call for the customer.

Are you devoted to serving others in your relationshipsas devoted as the high-end clothing store Nordstrom is? Their e mployees are known to live and demonstrate the stores mantra, to serve and be kind to everyone, from the affluent wealthy customer to the lowly homeless person living on the streets.

Can you end relationships decisivelyas decisively as GE has been known to do? Jack Welch, former CEO, was notorious for the abrupt and efficient dismissal of employees, regardless of tenure, whose performance measured in the bottom 10 percent.

Throughout this book, I offer opportunities for you to evaluate how you behave in each of your relationships and ways to adjust your behavior and take advantage of opportunities so that your relationships become intentional and plentiful.