Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

To work with other persons, establish trust. One technique is to go to their place and show a genuine interest in them as a person.

Someone asked me recently about how I would influence other people in an inter-department project. My reply was:

establish trust

Of course, the next question was, “How?” The answer to that was a bit longer, but the essence is:

go to their place

Here is the “secret.” I meet personally with a person who I want to influence. I meet them in their place – their office, their lab, their workbench, their warehouse. They are comfortable in their place. I sit and relax (in order to relax in foreign surroundings, you have to be comfortable with yourself, but that is the topic of another blog post one day). I look around their place and ask them about what their things.

Questions like:

• Who is in that photo?
• What is that cabin in that photo?
• Where did you get that pen and notebook?

Not very exciting, is it?

I try to establish that I am just another person like they are just another person. We are put into a working situation and are paid to do something good for the greater organization.

So, what do we do? We can,

1. Act like spoiled brats and fight
2. Act like normal persons and work together

I like number 2. Most persons do. Most persons will when they decide that I am just another person, just like them.