Teach relationship-building
Corbett also emphasizes the importance of building relationships and communicating by — you guessed it — communicating just that. Her messages to employees almost always include a reminder about it. But you shouldn’t stop there.
“It’s a soft skill, but I actually believe and the firm believes that that relationship-building culture is also a skill that you need to build,” she says. “So as opposed to just saying that it’s one of those softer sides of our strategy, we actually do have some training around that, and we actually do have a feedback process around that so that we can test the strengths of our relationships.”
A lot of the training revolves around the different styles of interaction and communication people have.
It starts with tests and evaluations to help employees identify their own styles, and that helps them connect those with other styles they might encounter.
“Everybody has a different style, and understanding and adapting to a style — even just in a conversation — is a skill that you need to build and have experience on,” Corbett says.
The training provides some of those skills by helping employees look for cues in conversations and gestures to improve their communication.
“If you have a style that’s very methodical and can be slower, when you’ve got a client sitting across the table from you tapping their fingers, it means that you should pick up the pace,” says Corbett, offering an example.
You can further train relationship-building by letting employees observe it in action as a third party. Corbett encourages that through shadowing.
“If you’re going to meet with a client, bring the intern with you. Bring the staff person with you,” she says. “Let them shadow you to experience and to get exposure, whether it’s [with] the client or firm leadership or whoever it is.”
She also urges her managers to adopt the same mindset.
“It’s easy to go to that meeting with just yourself or with a partner,” she tells them. “Take a second and think about bringing somebody with you.”
It’s one thing to give employees those tools and opportunities, but you should also get feedback about how they’re using them. Evaluate the relationships they’re building and how they’re communicating within those.
“You develop to high performance; it doesn’t just happen,” Corbett says. “It’s all supported by coaching and developing and feedback. And that feedback loop is a big part of that.”
She uses a 360-degree survey process and asks employees to give feedback on their peers and their direct reports.
Questions on the survey cover how employees communicate with questions such as, “Do you voice your opinions?” The survey also tries to uncover what kind of relationships their managers have built with them by asking, “Does your leader inspire you?” It also asks if they’re getting all of the tools they need to improve those areas through coaching and development.
“Our values and behaviors are imbedded in our coaching and development and evaluation process, so they illuminate the standards that we have as a profession,” she says. “They’re observable behaviors and they’re coachable behaviors.”
“It’s somewhat cultural — the importance of that relationship and the basis for establishing those relationships around our values and the way that we treat one another.”
How to reach: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, (213) 356-6000 or www.pwc.com
