One of the best areas in which to invest time when starting in a new role at a company is to effectively cultivate and build relationships. It’s hard to get anything done in a large organization just by yourself. Inevitably, you’ll need the guidance, support and resources of others. What’s more, is that even after you’ve started in your role, if you want to continue to succeed and grow, you’ll need to rely on others.
From my experience advising people in starting new roles in organizations, most people understand the value of building relationships, but they often fall short of investing the time and energy into doing so properly. On the flipside, the most successful people seem to have a knack for finding time to cultivate relationships that help them navigate their onboarding and continuously achieve milestones and outcomes in the role.
Unfortunately, not everyone knows who to build relationships with, how much time to spend doing this, and what to do. After coaching hundreds of people in their onboarding and helping dozens of companies develop their own onboarding programs, I’ve seen first-hand the challenges that come with helping people as they build the right relationships in their organization.
The Realities of Today’s Workplace
In 2023, there are some realities of the workplace that we all need to understand and acknowledge that will help us see the value in cultivating and building relationships in order for us to do our jobs effectively.
Reality #1: Nobody wins alone.
In the workplace, there are few projects or deliverables that can be done and executed properly by a sole individual. At some point, you will have to rely on relationships and the interconnectedness of your workplace, both inside and outside of your organization. To illustrate this point, think about your day-to-day work, and consider how many projects or objectives you are working on that are solely within your control and rely on nobody else to execute, approve and finish. Even for professionals where there is a bit more clarity between the impact of what you do and the outcome (e.g. salespeople) they will often tell you that they regularly rely on other people within their company to close deals, secure contracts, or win over a tough customer.
Reality #2: Boundaries between teams and silos exist, but the work is still cross functional.
According to research from Gartner from 2017, 82% organizations said that employees must work closely with colleagues to achieve their objectives. In another study, 50% of employees said that in the previous three years they had experienced a greater need to coordinate and collaborate to complete their work. Even though your specific team or business unit might have a charter or set of metrics or OKRs that are unique, the task of interdependence and reliance on other people continues to grow.
This is especially true at midsize to large organizations, where there are projects in which you have numerous stakeholders, teams and functions involved in executing a project or goal. As a client once said to me, “Working in a large organization is a never-ending group project.”
Many of us experienced this acutely during the early days of the global pandemic, where we all had to adjust to working remotely and learning how to collaborate in a 100% distributed manner.
Reality #3: Information is not always evenly distributed.
Information is power, and while companies rely on many tools and technologies to make information accessible in an organization, information doesn’t always get passed along or made accessible in a timely and efficient manner.
My favorite example of this comes from my friends and colleagues who work at Google. Talk to them about how simple or easy it is to find and search for information in their company and they’ll ironically tell you how difficult it is to find information. Unfortunately, information sometimes exists in silos or on hard drives or in people’s brains. It isn’t always accessible in an equitable fashion. Sometimes the biggest unlock or value add you can provide is finding the person who knows the information or key insight that will unlock the progress to the project you are working on.
Reality #4: Everyone is busy and focused on their tasks.
We all have our own to-do lists, OKRs, KPIs, MBOs and items that we need to get done each and every day. However, if we take the previous things to be true (everything is cross functional and people don’t work in silos), then we need the help of others to get those things on our to-do list done.
The challenge is, everyone else has a to-do list, a set of OKRs, KPis, etc., that they are working on as well. In order for those things to get done, you need to get others to pay attention to what you are doing and pitch in. Doing so requires sound relationship building, so that when you do come looking for their guidance, they are willing to assist.
Reality #5: Who you know and who knows you matters.
Whether you’re in a startup organization that is moving at warp speed, or in a large organization where you are a small part in a big machine, knowing the right people and having the right people know you is critical to achieving goals and milestones.
Reality #6: How you make people feel is sometimes as important as your ideas.
We’ve all been there before. We come up with a really great idea for a project that is going to demonstrate significant value, put a project plan into place, and begin executing the plan. A few weeks later, someone else in the organization finds out about it, and because they are tangentially involved or are above you, they are offended that they were not involved sooner. And they end up squashing the project. While this is an extreme scenario, degrees of this are not uncommon. It illustrates the fact that while some people believe that meriotracry exists, the fact that we are human prevents that from ever happening. People have feelings and egos, and sometimes, with the right power or influence, those feelings and egos can trump even the best of ideas from seeing the light of day.
On the flipside, when you actively cultivate and bring in the right people at the right time and pair that with a great idea, positive things can happen.
The upshot of all of this? Getting things done requires execution, but it also requires making sure the right people with the right skills and insights are contributing to the cause. And while organizational inertia or structure can go a long way, being able to marshal the right people to contribute their knowledge and expertise is fundamental to the success of achieving a goal or outcome. This is why investing time into building and cultivating relationships with your colleagues and coworkers is absolutely critical to your success, whether you are onboarding into a new role or just trying to level up in the role that you are in.
In fact, I’m going to make the case here that proactively finding time to build relationships is at least 20-25% of your job.
Common Mistakes With Building Relationships at Work
Despite research on the importance of cultivating and building relationships to achieve results and success, many employees fall short in this department, which then can lead to suboptimal outcomes. A few common mistakes that I often see include the following.
Mistake #1: Building relationships with everyone
The person who does this comes into the role understanding that relationships are critical to success, but often just builds relations as a “check the box” exercise. While it’s great for getting your name out there and meeting people, a quantity over quality approach doesn’t help longer term objectives.
Pro Tip: Work with your manager to prioritize the most important people that you need to meet. Ask your manager for help in making warm intros and giving you background on each of these people.
Mistake #2: One and done
Sometimes, people come into a role and want to build relationships. They figure out the most important people to meet and they set up calls and meetings to meet those people. After they get through the list, they stop. Cultivating and building relationships means just that. Cultivating takes time and is not just a one and done activity that you check the box next to once you’ve completed it; rather, it is an ongoing activity. Intuitively, many of us know this from our personal lives, as the friends we are closest with are ones we’ve built up a connection with over many years. But we forget this when it comes to the workplace.
Pro Tip: Keep track of the times you actively go out and cultivate relationships with key stakeholders and peers. Schedule days or reminders in your calendar or to-do list for checking in with peers and colleagues.
Mistake #3: Asking without giving
Any good relationship is a two way street, a bit of both give and take. Especially when starting off, some people focus so much on relationship building for their own personal gain that they forget that this is a chance for the other person to gain as well.
For example, I met a new hire who had recently come into our organization, and I looked up their background to find out they had a great skill set for a bunch of things that we were working on. I was so excited to talk to them because I knew they had this expertise and I felt they could share. This individual was new to the organization, and was totally flustered when I bombarded them with all of these questions about something they clearly didn’t want to talk about anymore. In hindsight, I should have been more accommodating in wanting to help them before diving into my own agenda about what I cared to talk about.
Pro Tip: Before making a request or asking for something from someone, make sure you offer them something first.
Mistake #4: Being inauthentic about building relationships
One of the reasons why people feel so allergic to networking is due to the inauthentic nature that sometimes comes from people who try and build relationships without having a genuine interest in actually meeting and connecting with the other person. It feels fake and forced, even if there are positive intentions behind it. This causes people to close down, and it creates a lack of trust between both parties.
Pro Tip: Telling someone to “be authentic” is tricky advice, so instead of telling you to be authentic, I would encourage you, before going into any type of activity where you hope to build a relationship with someone, to honestly ask yourself why you want the relationship.
Frameworks for Building Better Relationships at Work
To help you think about how you can effectively build relationships within your company as you start a new job, I would like to share a number of mental models and frameworks.
1. Understand your capacity to build relationships through relational intelligence.
Esther Perel once said that the quality of your relationships is what determines the quality of your life. For her, this was true not just in marital relationships but relationships with colleagues and teammates at work. At the heart of this is the concept of relational intelligence,
“Relational Intelligence is our ability as humans to connect with others and establish trust.”
The term relational intelligence is defined as the ability to connect with others within the workplace and to establish mutual trust. It is one’s ability to connect with others, establish boundaries, understand work habits, and learn how to work through disagreements and issues in a respectful and collaborative manner.
As more and more aspects of our work rely on interpersonal relationships, working on distributed teams, and serving diverse customers, our ability to relate to others and to hold space for both of your unique ways of working through relational intelligence are what will lead to positive outcomes. Stronger relationships make for more meaningful discussions, more innovative solutions, and ultimately better business outcomes.
Demonstrating relational intelligence doesn’t mean that you have to like everyone or that you have to get along with all of your colleagues and co-workers. Rather, it is correlated to the level of trust and safety that you can create so that people can respectfully disagree, raise uncomfortable issues and feel the sense of psychological safety that’s needed to work through difficult issues that may arise.
2. Learn how to build relationships through competence and warmth.
Amy Cuddy, the former Harvard Business School professor, found through her research that people perceive people, brands and organizations based on two dimensions: competence and warmth. Competence means, think you are good at what you are doing?” and Trust means, “Do I like you?”
“Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: ‘What are this person’s intentions toward me?’ and ‘Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?’”
Imagine this on a 2×2 graph, and on a scale of “low” to “high.”
Obviously, you want to be seen as someone who is highly competent and highly trusted (top right). But without taking the time to cultivate a relationship, it’s easy to see how you can get stuck in any of these other areas. Similarly, this model is also helpful as others within your company look to build relationships with you. How are others demonstrating trust or competency to you? How are you viewing others who you engage with? Knowing this can help you not only evaluate how you are communicating and conveying yourself to others, but how you might be evaluating others who are doing the same to you.
We are constantly evaluating others on the scale of warmth vs competence based on non-verbal signals. At the same time, we are also sending our fair share of non-verbal signals. This judgment of warmth and competence determines why we hire someone, why we engage easily with one client but not another, and even why we may win or lose business.
According to Cuddy, most people in the workplace believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented and be seen positively by others. But Cuddy suggests that warmth, or trustworthiness, is the most important factor in how people evaluate you.
As you think about building and cultivating relationships with your peers at work, consider the following ways to build competency and warmth in the eyes of others.
Building warmth
- Making eye contact, smiling and showing vulnerability
- Listening closely
- Showing empathy to demonstrate that you can understand their feelings
Building competence
- Delivering and executing – doing what you say you will do
- Asking thoughtful questions – doing research and asking questions that demonstrate your knowledge and insight
- Following up – showing others that you’re committed
3. Focus on building exceptional relationships.
David Bradford and Carol Rubin are the authors of Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues, as well as the professors behind the popular Stanford GSB Class, “Touchy Feely.” Their book, which was written based on teaching a class on developing exceptional relationships for almost three decades, is one of the best books to read for learning how to build relationships.
There are many nuggets of wisdom in this book, but one framework that comes to mind is their six hallmarks of exceptional relationships, which are true for any type of relationship.
These are:
- You can be more fully yourself, and so can the other person.
- Both of you are willing to be vulnerable.
- You trust that self-disclosures will not be used against you.
- You can be honest with each other.
- You deal with conflict productively.
- Both of you are committed to each other’s growth and development.
As you think about the relationships you are cultivating with your peers at work, evaluate the relationship quality against these elements to better understand where you are at.
How to Cultivate Relationships at Work: Practical Advice for Building Relationships
Over the years, I’ve refined my strategies and tactics for proactively cultivating and building relationships at work. These are some of the ways in which I think I have had success, and what I personally do myself.
1. Further the relationship by asking thoughtful questions.
Getting time to build relationships is critical, but so is actually taking the time to do it. You need to make sure there are continued reasons to follow up to allow the relationship to grow. One way to do that is by asking thoughtful questions. This example comes from a friend of mine, Elijah, who joined a large healthcare company. He was overwhelmed by the number of people that he had to meet. To help him keep track and further cultivate relationships, Elijah decided to end each conversation he had with an employee with two questions.
- If I were to come to you for advice on something, what would it be?
- Who is someone else that you respect and admire in this company, and why?
These two questions did a number of things that were helpful to Elijah in building relationships in his new role. First, it gave him context for what the individual was good at or excellent in, which was helpful as he was getting up to speed on his own role. Second, it gave him a reason to reach back out to the individual if he needed something, because he now knew a reason for reaching back out. And finally, it helped him find other people who were influential and important in the company that he could then go and reach out to.
2. Proactively offer to provide feedback.
We all have many things going on at once in our workplace. Taking time to focus on helping others through thoughtful feedback is a great way to engender trust and to be helpful to your colleagues and peers. Furthermore, from my experience, most people don’t go out of their way to proactively provide feedback to others, so you may find that when you offer to do this, others are pleasantly surprised.
3. Practice “The Ben Franklin Effect”
The Ben Franklin effect teaches us that others view us more favorably when we ask them for advice. Put this theory to the test by taking time to ask for advice from other people around you who you want to build a relationship with. Let’s say you’re working on a project that has a due date a few months out. Start out by asking for a favor to have a colleague review your early draft of your presentation, or to ask for feedback on the project plan. This not only helps you win their favor and trust, but it could also help you get some valuable feedback on what you are working on.
4. Make the first volley
Self-disclosure, a concept talked about at length in Connect by Rubin and Bradford, is the ability to let yourself be more fully known. Self-disclosure creates more opportunities to connect and increases trust between yourself and someone else. When we reveal parts of ourselves to others, it allows others to see more of who we are, which increases the opportunity to build trust. It’s often natural in a relationship to want someone else to go first, but instead, Rubin and Bradford encourage us to make the first volley. They write:
“What comes first, safety or disclosure? It can be easy to think, ‘Until I know I can trust that person and be accepted, I’m not going to take the risk of disclosing. I need to first know how they’re going to respond.’ The causal direction has to be reversed—that risking a small disclosure is what builds safety. If each person waits for the other to take a risk, little progress is ever made.”
If this seems difficult or awkward, consider their advice and use the 15% disclosure: a small enough disclosure that doesn’t harm you, but that is impactful enough that it can make a difference.
5.Find your relationship building channels and tactics
What works for you may not work for someone else. Furthermore, someone might love engaging in large groups, and others may prefer 1:1 settings. Find the best channels or tactics that work for you. If you’re someone that does better in 1:1 settings, perhaps try 1:1 zoom calls or getting to know people in small groups.
6.Make it continuous
One of the biggest mistakes people make is waiting until they need something to start cultivating relationships. Instead of being reactive, be proactive by developing habits and continuous efforts to build relationships with your peers. Whether you need to include it as part of your weekly to-do list, block time in your calendar, or add it to your career development plan, finding ways to incorporate mechanisms that help you make a habit of spending time to build relationships help you ensure you have the right level of trust and relationships needed to succeed.
Conclusion: Put in the Work to form effective relationships at work
Opportunities from relationship building and networking happen for you when someone else is able to connect something that they heard you say with another idea, person, opportunity, or project. Opportunities from networking are like equations. There are a bunch of variables at play, including the other person’s knowledge, insights, and contacts, but the variable that is always the tripwire to all of this is your own thoughts and intentions. People cannot help you if they don’t know what you are thinking, and opportunities in the networking equation come about when you make your intentions known.
Relationships at work are important because none of us live in a vacuum, and we all rely on others in the context of a workplace and organization. If you want to be successful at what you do in your job, consider the ways in which you can proactively make time and space to invest in relationships.
At any given moment, make sure you are prepared (if asked) to share either what you are working on, what is keeping you up at night, or what is consuming your time. You may not always get to share this thought or idea, but if given the chance, this is what is going to be the thing that helps someone figure out how they can help you.
Do you want to help your employees improve their engagement and productivity through better collaboration and relationships? Contact us today to learn more about our leadership development programs today!
Additional Resources For Building Relationships at Work