Building And Maintaining Professional Relationships

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 1, 2025, 3:44 PM

building and maintaining professional relationships

Tim Madden is an Executive Coach and former Headhunter. Founder of Executive Career Upgrades, he's on a mission to help accelerate careers. Strong professional relationships impact career growth and success. They can help you gain valuable industry knowledge, find new job opportunities and build a strong network of colleagues and mentors. According to Haiilo, 69% of employees work harder when they feel appreciated, and workplace relationships are a key component of creating feelings of appreciation and improving employee engagement. However, building and maintaining these relationships requires effort and attention.

Here are some tips on how to do so effectively. People are more likely to want to work with you and maintain a relationship if they feel you're being genuine and authentic with them. Don't try to be someone you're not, and don't try to impress others by pretending to know more than you do. Instead, be honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to learn from others. Research shows that authenticity is important in building trust in relationships. Building professional relationships is not all about you.

Make an effort to show interest in the other person's work, goals and experiences. Ask questions and listen actively to what they have to say. This will help you build rapport and establish a stronger connection. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, showing interest in others can increase feelings of positive regard and trust by 50%. “Building relationships is not just a critical career skill but a critical life skill,” says Rebecca Zucker, Stanford Graduate School of Business alumna and partner at leadership development consultancy Next Step Partners. “One of the biggest mistakes people make is to bifurcate their personal and professional relationships,” she continues.

“Our relationships are our relationships. They actually help us live longer, so they’re important not just to our careers but to our health.” Here, Zucker, who earned her MBA in 1994, provides interrelated best practices and perspectives for building, maintaining, and accessing your network of relationships for your benefit and that of others. “Never assume who will or won’t be helpful,” Zucker says. The mentality supports taking as broad an approach as possible to building relationships by putting yourself out there, across settings. Zucker, for example, followed her own advice while in business school: “Every time I was on a new group project, I’d go up to people I didn’t know and invite them to be in...

That ensured I met those I didn’t already know. Besides, who wouldn’t want someone to come up and say, ‘I want you to be in my group’?” We’ve put together a list of good remote team-building activities to enhance general camaraderie and relationship dynamics. Learn more! In its simplest form, coaching is a partnership based on well-timed questions, open communication, mutual commitment, and learning and personal development. Every professional needs strong business relationships to be successful.

These relationships include interactions and connections you build with colleagues, peers, and other stakeholders. These connections are some of your most valuable assets in both the short and long term, so it is well worth nurturing and strengthening these relationships. With skill, practice, and commitment—and a few of the following tips—you can look forward to curating a network of business relationships that is mutually beneficial and supportive of your achievements. Business relationships can come in many forms, but ultimately they are about advancing your goals, particularly within an organization. Pamela Rucker, instructor of Strengthening Business Relationships: Creating Strategic Alliances and Building Trust at Harvard Division of Continuing Education’s Professional & Executive Development, says that the way leaders perform their work changes as they... Professional relationships are your connections and interactions with your colleagues, clients, partners, and other people in your work environment.

They are essential for career success, personal growth, and business performance. In this blog post, I will share some tips and techniques for building and maintaining strong professional relationships that will benefit you and your organization. The first step to building professional relationships is establishing trust and effective communication with the people you work with. Trust is the foundation of any relationship, and it is built by being honest, reliable, respectful, and supportive. Effective communication is the key to expressing your ideas, needs, expectations, and feedback clearly and constructively. You can improve your communication skills by listening actively, asking open-ended questions, using positive language, and avoiding jargon.

Another critical aspect of building professional relationships is empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It helps you to connect with others on an emotional level and to show that you care about their well-being. You can develop your empathy skills by paying attention to the body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions of others, acknowledging their emotions, and offering help when needed. Once you have built professional relationships, you must maintain and nurture them over time. This requires ongoing communication and appreciation.

You should keep in touch with your contacts regularly and update them on your progress, achievements, challenges, and opportunities. You should also express gratitude for their support, guidance, collaboration, or referrals. You can do this by sending a thank-you note, giving a compliment, or providing a testimonial. Another factor affecting your professional relationship quality is balancing personal and professional boundaries. While sharing some personal information and interests with your contacts is good, you should also respect their privacy and preferences. You should avoid topics that are too sensitive or controversial, such as politics, religion, or personal problems.

You should also be mindful of the time and frequency of your interactions and avoid being too intrusive or demanding. In today’s fast-paced work environment, maintaining professional relationships in the workplace is crucial for career success. Building strong relationships with colleagues, superiors, and subordinates can enhance job satisfaction, boost productivity, and open doors to new opportunities. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of workplace relationships and provide practical tips on how to build and maintain them effectively. Strong workplace relationships play a significant role in career success and promotion opportunities. When you have strong relationships with your colleagues, you often have access to a network of support and guidance.

These relationships can provide opportunities to collaborate on projects, exchange knowledge and expertise, and receive mentorship or sponsorship. By building strong relationships, you increase your visibility and reputation within the workplace, which can lead to career advancement and promotion opportunities. Strong workplace relationships contribute to increased job satisfaction. When you have positive and supportive relationships with your colleagues, coming to work becomes more enjoyable. Strong relationships make the work environment feel more welcoming, inclusive, and supportive. When you feel supported and connected to your colleagues, it can positively impact your overall job satisfaction, motivation, and engagement with your work.

Strong workplace relationships foster enhanced collaboration and teamwork. When you have strong relationships with your colleagues, it becomes easier to work together effectively and efficiently. Trust, open communication, and mutual respect are the building blocks of strong relationships that create an environment conducive to collaboration. Strong relationships enable colleagues to leverage each other’s strengths, share resources, and approach challenges as a cohesive unit, leading to improved productivity and goal attainment. Strong relationships foster improved communication and conflict resolution. When you have a solid relationship with your colleagues, you can communicate more openly and effectively.

This means that you can actively listen, provide constructive feedback, and navigate conflicts in a more productive manner. Strong relationships also create an environment where colleagues feel comfortable expressing their concerns and seeking resolution in a respectful and professional manner. As humans, we depend on mutual cooperation with other people to survive and thrive. And mutual cooperation is possible only when we have a good relationship with others. This highlights the importance of good relationships in both, our personal and professional life. People spend a notable amount of their time at the workplace.

Thus, it is crucial to build professional relationships with fellow employees. A positive relationship with everyone along the hierarchical ladder benefits the individual and impacts the effectiveness of the whole organization. This could mean juniors, peers, peers from different departments, leaders, etc. A majority of hierarchical structures are based on the level of expertise and experience, so interacting with everyone and developing good relationships across hierarchies will allow you to understand the organization from the top... This will give you a better understanding of the organization. It will also give you a chance to learn new things and gain new points of view about things which you would otherwise be oblivious to.

This can also facilitate the exchange of an extensive amount of knowledge and experience. The workflow of any organization will improve when people across hierarchies have good relationships. Also Read: How to Get Your Organization Ready for Industry 4.0? It can also encourage collaboration, which is vital when working in teams. It will give you a chance to have people who can be sought out for any help or guidance and you can also help them in return. This imparts a sense of professional belonging and kinship.

Good relationships across hierarchies can help one develop empathy and know how to walk in someone else’s shoes. This makes one a better leader, employee, and better human overall. In short, having good relationships across hierarchies in an organization is pivotal, and it isn’t easy to develop when there are numerous people, each with their own background, culture, and comfort zones.

Building And Maintaining Professional Relationships

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