Building Relationships: Eight Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

When you need your colleagues' support, you hope they'll be there for you. But will they? Have you regarded relationship building as important in your day-to-day interactions with staff and colleagues?

A good working relationship isn't formed overnight. You build it one small behavior at a time. There are opportunities that are low-cost, relatively low-impact in terms of time, and available throughout your day. Miss them and you just may not have the support you need when you want it.

Eight common behaviors that will keep a work relationship from growing stronger:

1. Being so self-reliant that you never ask for help.
   Asking others for a suggestion or for their opinion indicates their importance to you (and you'll get lots of useful feedback as well).
   
2. Keeping conversations "all business."
   Actually, a 10-minute casual conversation here and there builds the kind of relationship that can withstand stress.
   
3. Multi-tasking when people talk to you.
   Checking your Blackberry, glancing at your email, taking a phone call, and allowing interruptions while someone is speaking with you are all signals the colleague doesn't matter to you. Put everything else on hold for the moment someone is talking to you.
   
4. Skipping small talk.
   Small talk may seem to be a time-waster. However, talking about activities and people that matter to the other person (or interests you both may share) says you care about people, not just work.
   
5. Beating around the bush when you could be talking straight.
   If you need to relay a tough decision or bad news, get to it. You want to be sensitive to the impact on the listener, but avoiding the point only makes it worse for the receiver.
   
6. Passing up opportunities to do someone a favor.
   Little generous gestures, especially when you aren't looking for a return favor, build good will and respect.
   
7. Keeping your emotions to yourself.
   Providing information to others about how you feel and why can help them get to know you and what is important to you. Expressing emotions in a manner that is appropriate to the workplace helps form commonalities and builds support.
   
8. Assuming you know how someone thinks or feels about a situation.
   There are as many different viewpoints as you have colleagues in your work world. Ask what they think and feel and focus on both their words and behaviors as they speak. When you say to yourself, "That is ridiculous," keep asking open-ended questions to determine why they think that way. Understanding the other person's perspective, even if you don't agree with it, builds respect within the relationship.