Building/Breaking working relationships

Business travel frequently mean traveling with superior, colleague(s) and/or subordinate(s) to foreign places we would otherwise not. Unlike working together in the office, business travel, especially with subordinates, avail itself opportunities for one to build stronger working relationship or destroy one. The following examples are based on actual events.

The design manager of a small company was traveling with one of his subordinate and two of their directors to a foreign country. They were there to negotiate a joint venture. The year was 1997 and mobile phone was not very affordable where they were. The evening after their arrival, the design manager noticed that his subordinate looks rather uneasy and asked if everything is okay. His subordinate said that he has not had the opportunity since arriving to call home to let his wife know that he is okay and that he knows that his wife and his mother will be worried. Without hesitation, even though he may have to pay for the call, the design manager reached for his mobile phone and let his subordinate call home that very moment. Imagine that you were that subordinate. How would you feel towards your manager after that?

And this. The Finance Manager (FM) of an MNC at one of their remote site organized a meeting for her site GM to meet with a vendor at their regional HQ in a city that is an hour flight away. Upon arrival, the FM had to make a detour to the washroom and so her GM and another colleague travelling together proceed through their immigration formalities ahead of her. After completing her immigration formalities, she couldn't find her GM nor her other colleague. Instead she received a call from her GM saying that he is in a taxi heading to the office! Her GM has "abandoned" her! She arrived at the meeting 5 mins after her GM and everyone in the office were very surprised and asked what happened. The FM tried to put a positive spin to the whole thing but it was very obvious that the GM had abandon the FM at the airport. Privately, this FM said that the event says a lot about the GM and that it has left a negative impression. If you were the FM, how would you feel towards the GM after the event?

A good advice for managers in these situations can be found in chapter on terrain in Sun Tzu's thesis on The Art of War [1] and Sun Tzu advised "Look upon your soldiers as you do infants, and they willingly go into deep valleys with you; look upon your soldiers as beloved children, and they willingly die with you."

[The above excerpt is from Thomas Cleary's translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War available at Shambhala]

[1] T. Sun, The Art of War. Thomas Cleary, Trans. Massachusetts: Shambala, 1999, pp. 146.