7 Tips to maintain good relations with your subordinates

Having good, effective relationship with your subordinates is critical to your success as a manager. You have to help them succeed for you to be successful in your role. A healthy work relationship with the subordinates creates fosters a positive work environment and therefore is key to the growth of any organisation.

Like any other relationship, there are many wavelengths and to maintain it, sustain it and to grow it, a proper flow is required. A Harvard Business Review survey shows that 58% of people say that they trust strangers than their own bosses. There is also a long standing corporate jargon which says that employees don’t leave the company, they leave their bosses.

Good relationships take investment in form of mutual admiration, understanding and a lot of time. Here are the key areas to focus on to create and maintain a healthy relationship with your subordinates:

* Foster Trust

The most important part of a boss-employee relationship is trust. Always be honest with your employees and never twist your words. Be more transparent while you approach your employees. And never gossip about your employees or share any of their personal information to others. Trust is the building block and makes your relationship with employees sustainable. So trust-building will give you great results. When you can bridge the relationship with trust, your can sustain it.

* Help your subordinates succeed

Provide clear direction on what they need to achieve. Ensure that your subordinates understand your direction and where you are taking them. Validate that they have full understanding on their roles and how they would contribute to the success of your team and the organisation. Work with them to establish their performance goals. Then, have a conversation with them on the drafted goals. Provide feedback as you see fit. Give them some room to negotiate their own performance goals. Mutually agree on the ‘right’ goals and establish method to measure success.Practice two-way feedback for continuous improvement. Demonstrate that you are opened to receiving feedback from your subordinates and would act on the feedback received. This would build trust among your subordinates that you are serious about continuous improvement. They would feel safe to give and receive feedback. Gradually, this will help you develop a healthy work culture.

* Appreciate where appreciation is due

Praise your employees for excellent work whenever you come across it. Give your employees the appreciation they need, they work for you and dedicate a lot of time and effort for your company’s growth. Pat their backs, make them feel special and let them know how much you value their work. Do it honestly and not just for the sake of it. Though it would take very little time to appreciate their good work, for them this can bring a whole new motivation and engagement in their work

* Be open and respectful

Share your expectations, your work style as well as your likes and dislikes with each one of them. Likewise, seek to understand their expectations of you. Making extra effort to remember the names of your subordinates and to acknowledge their existence helps you demonstrate that you respect them and their value to the team and the organisation. If someone needs a feedback or needs to be reprimanded, do it within the confines of a separate room and away from other team members.

* Have one-to-one interactions

Going the extra mile to go for having a conversation to your employees and to engage them in a one-to-one interaction will serve you good if you want to develop good relationship with them.

* Implement autonomy

Give your employees the freedom in your workplace. Nobody would appreciate you if you don’t give your employees enough room and space to complete their tasks. It’s very evident that autonomy in the workplace increases job satisfaction and your relationship with employees.This would create a sense of support for your employees. Take time to ask them if they are happy at the job and if they find support enough to successfully complete the task assigned. Also seek their suggestions they have on the current way of work.

* Develop a learning attitude

Sticking to the proverb ‘The boss is always right’, isn’t going to do you any good if you want to have a good relationship with your employees. Keep a learning attitude and this would help the employees to feel more comfortable while they give their point of view to you. This also helps the employees to realize that they are all the same and gives a sense of oneness.

At the end of the day, the Boss-subordinate relationship is all about trust and a strong, unrelenting belief in their work. Hence, a sincere collaboration from both the parties is imperative for the growth or any organisation. Learn, grow, understand and implement is the underlying philosophy to a great boss-subordinate relationship.