text: Give Your Dependencies A Hug | Blog
  Give Your Dependencies A Hug
  Love the Company of Others.
  Do you really understand the value of those people around you?
  The digital revolution has made it easy for us to be in touch but are our relationships really benefiting from it? In particular, think about your work environment and the dependencies that exist between yourself and your peers, direct reports, leaders and stakeholders.
  If you're someone who either depends upon the service of others or in turn is a dependency for another person consider how well you manage your dependency by asking yourself three questions:
  Why does the dependency exist?
  What are the benefits that the dependency creates?
  Am I investing enough in the dependency to sustain a positive return?
  It's easy to lose focus of the underlying drivers of success when they are seemingly intangible.
  Dependencies in the workplace are difficult to manage because they will typically only be of concern when their potential failure could be an obstruction or cost for business.
  A classic example is in the area of risk management. I challenge you that you will never find a good risk register that doesn't contain a risk related to the failure of a dependency between people.
  That's because firstly, most organisations are heavily dependent on the collaboration and coordination of roles and teams to manage cross-functional processes.
  Secondly, without a robust control environment, the responsibility to manage people dependencies can be inadequately understood and appreciated.
  In my book Learning Dangerously, article #25 titled, "The Truth About Your Dependencies", I propose the management of people dependencies has been a prevalent business theme throughout the modernisation of work over the past 200 years.
  Even today, at the heart of all the theories and models about leadership is an underlying dependency of the leader on their people to organise themselves to get the work done and the people on the leader to provide the direction and inspiration to do the work.
  So imagine the quality of leadership if leaders and people alike considered their roles from the perspective of dependency and focused on the three questions:
  I know that leaders particularly struggle with the third question about the size of their investment. From experience it is easy to underestimate the amount of effort necessary to sustain a positive dependency. But unless you eliminate or automate that dependency, the performance and reliability of your dependency will reflect the size of your investment.
  Maybe it's time you gave your dependencies a hug and loved the company of others.
  Craig Stephens is the author of Learning Dangerously. Craig mentors and coaches people to measure their performance and realise their greatest success. If you want to learn to build the strong dependencies for your success, then contact Craig and realise the benefits of Learning Dangerously.