How to Build Relationships to Work Better
Practical and specific tactics you can use to build better workplace relationships
For 13+ years I spent my time working in large organizations. One of the best parts of this was being able to work with and meet lots of smart, intelligent and talented people.
These relationships allowed me to be effective and productive in my job, opened me up to leadership and career opportunities that I could have never accessed on my own, and enabled me to feel a sense of engagement, well-being and overall purpose in the work that I was doing.
There definitely were hard moments, and not so fun times of working for a professional services firm with demanding clients, as well as at a software company that was on a rocketship of growth, but in those tough moments, again, those relationships made the experience so valuable.
Feeling like you were part of something bigger than yourself and also having people who you could turn to for help, guidance and advice was not just helpful for navigating the day to day, but socially and emotionally it helped with my overall well-being and sense of connectedness.
When I became an entrepreneur 2 years ago, there were some things that I expected which were going to be hard, and others that surprised me. One of those things was just how lonely it could be. I went from being at a company of 80,000 to a company of 1.
Instead of having people to turn to for help or to problem solve, to brainstorm, or to get something done, or just to connect with, it was just myself. What I realized, pretty early on, was that I had taken the people and relationships I had for granted.
Part of the challenge was that I was so fortunate to have a built in infrastructure of people, relationships and resources when I worked in a corporate environment. While some of this just happens when you work at a company with that kind of scale, a good portion of it was because I went out of my way, to intentionally build relationships and a network of people who I could turn to and call on for help, guidance, co-creation, and support.
This experience has reinforced to me something that I’ve always believed: If you want to be successful in the workplace, being able to cultivate and intentionally build relationships is part of everyone’s job.
2 years into this journey, I’ve learned even more about building relationships and incorporating that into the work that I do each and every day. And in a very meta fashion, part of the work I do each day as a leadership facilitator working with leaders and managers is helping them understand how to build better relationships to improve team effectiveness, especially in a hybrid and remote workplace.
Relationships Make The World Go Round (at least at work)
If you think about many of the challenges that exist in the workplace today, many of them stem back to the relationships (or lack thereof) and the associated connection, belonging and engagement we feel between ourselves, others, and our company. Relationships are the leading contributor to workplace well-being. Furthermore, BetterUp found that people who experience more connection at work, achieve their goals more often and enjoy greater well-being. However, 61% of us, according to a Cigna study in 2018 (even before the pandemic) struggled with loneliness, and despite the many benefits of remote work, Glassdoor found many remote workers reported feeling isolated and disconnected from their organization.
In my experience, most employees understand that relationships are important, to both their well-being and professional success, but often struggle with finding the time or knowing how to go about building relationships in the workplace. I wanted to share a couple recommendations for how I’ve been able to embrace this approach and also structure in time in my day to day work to intentionally build relationships to achieve my goals.
Specific Tactics You Can Try To Build Better Relationships
There are many different reasons for how and why to build relationships with others. Here are some common reasons I have, and then a specific approach or tactic that I use to achieve this objective
1)Strengthening the quality of your ideas and your work
Sometimes, we just need ideas, feedback and brainstorming to help us come up with solutions. None of us operate in a silo, and all of our work ladders up to a bigger company goal. Working with others can help us navigate that complexity whether it’s to solve a problem or generate possibilities in our jobs. Finding ways to bring together other people who can help strengthen the quality of your work is a great way to not only do better work, but also to strengthen your relationships with your peers.
Example of this: In my last job as a marketer, I worked on a team of marketers and in an organization of hundreds of marketers. While we all had different responsibilities, we shared many similar projects or tasks. One way I capitalized on this was by organizing Bullpen Sessions.
I would bring 4 people together (virtually) and each of us would pitch to the group 1 project we were working on at the moment, and then get feedback from the other people in the session. Each person would A) get feedback on something they were working on and B) give feedback or share insights to the other members.
Most of the time, everyone walked away with new insights on how to strengthen what they were working on, and many of us found greater collaboration opportunities as a result of the feedback. This works great inside your company, especially when you do it with others who have a similar role, but perhaps are on a different team, or in a different part of the organization.
#2)Learning from and with other people
It’s impossible to know everything, and in an ever-changing world of work, most of us encounter uncertain or unclear circumstances. That’s exactly where turning to others can be helpful. Asking a colleague or mentor for help or guidance on how to solve a specific problem or do a specific task is a no brainer. This does two things, first, it helps you find an answer or get closer to an answer. Second, the Ben Franklin effect shows us that it makes you more trusting and likable when you ask others for their expertise or advice. Asking for help and learning from others shows a sense of curiosity and humility, two things that many people like out of their peers.
Example of this: In my last corporate job, at the end of a major project, I would host a post-mortem with the cross-functional team. We would review the results, go over our lessons learned, identify what we could do better, and then collect any documents and templates we could reuse in the future.
3)Rapidly and intentionally building trust and connection with stakeholders
Most of us work in jobs that require us to work through and with other people in order to be successful. These collaborative and cross-functional projects don’t happen unless you have strong relationships and a good pedigree with your peers and stakeholders. When you can intentionally and proactively make time to build trust and connection with key colleagues, it can increase your ability to achieve shared goals.
Example of this: When I used to lead engagements while a management consultant, at the beginning of each project I would host a session with all team members to specifically talk about the what, why, and how of the work that we needed to get done. Many times, these engagements were short (3-4 months) and none of us had worked together, so finding ways to build trust and connection were really important.
What focused on the key deliverables, why focused on the mission, and how (arguably the most important) focused on each of our preferences and insights around how we work best. While we didn’t have user manuals at the time, I would later use these as well, but these gave us an open forum to start building trust but also to provide clarity and awareness to each other about how we could work and collaborate effectively.
#4)Elevating your work to enhance yourself and others
One of the hardest lessons to learn in a corporate job is that while doing great work is important, but if nobody else knows about the great work you are doing, it can be hard to be noticed or get the credit that you deserve. One way to solve that is to share your work with others so it helps them and helps you. Making other people aware of your work and practicing internal marketing is a great way to A) get yourself visibility and credit for your work B) help other people out who might benefit and C) open yourself up to future collaboration and leadership opportunities. This can feel difficult for some, especially those who come from cultures where “showing off” or “tooting your own horn” can feel awkward, but it's important to remember that sharing your work can benefit other people just as much as it can benefit you. Furthermore, this can also be a great way to collectively advance a cross-functional team’s goals, when you not only elevate yourself, but others as well.
Example of This: For cross-functional projects that I led, I would often create something called a “walking deck.” This was a brief deck which showed our project, key goals, milestones and key team members. I would make this available and accessible, and often share it with key leaders inside the organization so they knew what was going on at any given time. This helped our projects gain visibility and awareness amongst leaders, and oftentimes helped us get introductions or connections into other teams or people, simply because people started sharing the document and connecting us to other people. At the end of a project, I would always include an email to the key leaders who were supporting the project with a summary of the project, as well as highlighting the key people who participated. This helped people get their work noticed, and to do so in a way that didn’t feel too braggy or showy.
#5)Improving our well-being and overall engagement
One of the biggest oversights people make is they think they have to wait for their organization or leader to foster connection or build relationships, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You can proactively take matters into your own hands, especially when it involves helping you feel more connected and improves your own well-being. Research shows that when we take actions that help others, it releases endorphins in the brain and boosts happiness for us as well as the people we help.
Example of This: One practice that I have adopted from Adam Grant is the concept of a 5-minute favor. The idea behind a five minute favor is to find something that is a small investment of time that means a big deal to someone else. It can literally take 5 minutes.
As a podcaster, I know how important it is to have reviews for my podcast. One five minute favor that I practice is that each month, I make time to write a review for a podcast that I listen to, and then afterwards, I will send a LinkedIn connection request to the podcast host, letting them know that I appreciate their podcast and that I wrote them a review. 10 times out of 10 I get a response full of appreciation and gratitude, and have made a couple really good podcast friends as a result. I always feel better after doing it, and I know the other person appreciates it.
#6) Making work better for everyone
An underrated quality of the workplace is being a teammate and colleague that other people want around. It’s like the professional athlete who everyone wants on their team because they’re a great teammate or a positive influence on the practice field or in the locker room. A similar approach can be applied to the workplace.
At the end of the day, business is about connecting people together, and the degree that you can play a small role in facilitating connection, trust and happiness on your team, not only makes your day better, but also makes others day better too, can often go along way to advancing yourself. Again, these don’t have to be big gestures, but simple habits practiced over time can often go a long way.
Example of this: During the early days of the pandemic, my team wanted to make an intentional effort to make people feel safe and connected. One way we did this was during our team meetings. Each meeting, we would start the meeting with a game called “hot seat” where someone got put on the “hot seat” and then got asked fun/silly questions for 90 seconds so we could learn more about them. Each week a different team member was on the hot seat, and it was a great way to lighten the mood, but also just to connect with each other on a personal level.
Another example of something we did was to create a #winning thread in our slack, where when you saw someone do something great, you could post to the thread and mention them and give them a shoutout.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, an organization is just a bunch of people that are working toward shared goals, and business is fundamentally about connecting people and things together to achieve mutual value. The degree to which you can cultivate relationships with others is going to not only make you better at your job, but help you feel better about the work you do each day. We spend a lot of our lives at work, we owe it to ourselves to feel good about how we do it.
Note: If you have any of your own tactics and ways you build relationships with your peers and colleagues I’d love to hear what is working for you, especially in a remote or distributed environment