Explore the core leadership concept of relationship building and learn how emerging leaders can leverage strong interpersonal connections to drive both personal growth and organizational success. Leadership expert Debbie Dykman introduces five modules that focus on strengthening professional relationships, improving communication, and cultivating highly collaborative teams.
Key Insights
- Develop a strong professional network by identifying key workplace relationships and creating intentional strategies to strengthen and expand them.
- Enhance emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills to navigate interpersonal challenges and support healthier team dynamics.
- Use leadership approaches such as mentoring and coaching to foster collaboration and guide high-performing, relationship-driven teams.
This lesson is a preview from our Leading Through Relationship-Building Course Online & Emerging Leader Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome to Leading Through Relationship Building. My name is Debbie Dykman, and I am going to be your instructor for this course. I look forward to working with you as you consider your role as an emerging leader in relationship building within your organization. We know that this is a key component for effective leadership and we are, through the five modules that we're going to be working on, give you an opportunity to really reflect upon where your relationships are now in the workplace and what are some things that you may want to consider doing to create even more and higher quality relationships that are going to serve you well in your professional growth and also serve the people around you as well as your organization as a whole.
So let's take a look at the course outcomes that we are looking for and as we move into that we know that if we consider the quote by Ben Stein, personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows and so we're going to take that concept and apply it to our work settings as we move along. So let's take a look at the course contents. You'll see that we have five modules.
The first one is building a network of relationships, and there are several activities that will help you analyze the network that you have in existence right now and what you can do to increase and expand that network. Module two focuses on building emotional intelligence, and again, that is a key component in building quality relationships. We know in module three that we have to address conflict resolution because relationships will produce a certain level of conflict and as emerging leaders we want to make sure that we have conflict resolution skill sets that we can apply with confidence and then as we move even further we want to consider in module four our role as a coach and a mentor to those people around us and ultimately as we get to module five we're going to take all of the skills that we've been working on throughout the course to build a collaborative team.
Again, another signature piece for effective leaders. So let's move on to module one and consider building a network of relationships. So, as we take a look at module one, we have our learning objectives here, and you'll see that the first one includes identifying relationships that are crucial to the workplace success and I said we would take a moment or two or three to actually analyze that and develop a plan, if you will, for how to improve those crucial workplace relationships.
I think that also requires us to take a look at what happens when we move into positions of greater formality in leadership, and what does that do to the relationships that we had before and to the relationships that we're developing now. We do want to plan for opportunities to deepen our relationships, and we do that through the communication process. We have to make sure our communication skills are up to speed and actually moving into excellence, better than everybody else's around you. When we do that, we can then also identify our opportunities to expand our relationships through the networking process, and ultimately, we want to be able to develop strategies that build and maintain relationships.
As a leader, consider yourself as a leader versus being just a colleague. What looks different for you as you become a leader, a formal leader?
