In so many organisations today leaders seem to have forgotten (or never learnt) the power and importance of building personal trusting relationships with those they lead, of listening to others with care and humanity, of making things happen through deep emotional engagement with the people in their teams. 

As we approach the end of 2015, we believe it is time to enter a new era of leadership where the requirement for leaders to build and maintain genuinely trusting relationships with those they lead takes centre stage. But how do effective leaders build trusting relationships? We now know that effective leaders use authentic, two way human conversations to build trusting, productive relationships with team members and others around them. Building these conversations into your daily life at work will not only make you a more effective and productive leader, but will also give you a deep sense of fulfilment and enhanced quality of life.

No longer is it the case that the quality of the relationships you have at work is something random or mysterious. There is growing evidence that, whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, a technical expert or a generalist, a sales executive or an accountant, you can deepen your relationships by consciously building these key conversations into every day of your working life. Through our work with thousands of leaders in hundreds of organisations around the world we have identified the five critical conversations that leaders should have  been having this year to transform trust and engagement at work:

1 Establishing a trusting relationship –Having a conversation with a team member encourages them to share a deep, mutual understanding of your respective drivers, preferences, motivators and de-motivators for high performance at work, which helps you both better understand what makes each other tick.

2 Agreeing mutual expectations –It is important to have a conversation about not only what you are both trying to achieve at work, but also why, and the expectations you have to support each other in achieving these outcomes.

3 Showing genuine appreciation –Help a team member focus on where they are being successful, to jointly understand the reasons for their success and to say how much you appreciate their contribution. You can also find further ways in which they can deploy their skills and talents to benefit both themselves and the organisation

4 Challenging unhelpful behaviour –Agree a new and more effective set of behaviours where what a team member or colleague is saying or doing is getting in the way of team performance.

5 Building for the future – Explore the future career aspirations of a team member to help you create conditions that will enable them to build that future career within your organisation rather than elsewhere. You may feel these conversations sound simple and obvious and perhaps they are. But every leader we talk to agrees with this fundamental observation – in today’s world of work they simply don’t happen – either enough or at all.

Of course the conversations aren’t linear, following one after the other mechanistically. The most effective leaders have internalised them and move smoothly from one to the next throughout their working day. And they aren’t seen an additional conversations to be added to an already busy schedule, but rather as an even more effective way to use regular catch up and review sessions. And even if you stumble over your words, or forget a specific question, or end up off track – they work anyway because what people detect and respond to is your genuine intention to make a connection, to be interested in them as a fellow human being, to reach out.

Nigel Purse, the co-author a 5 Conversations (£14.99, Panoma Press) which has recently been shortlisted for this years CMI Management Book of the Year.