By Brian Gates, OEED

What relationships do you have in your life and how well do you manage them? Relationship management is using awareness of your emotions and the emotions of others to manage interactions successfully. This ensures clear communication and effective handling of conflict. How we communicate is critical to building effective relationships, but sometimes it can also be challenging. The following steps could help you build and manage workplace relationships:

• Understand your strengths and weaknesses and develop relationship skills like communication, active listening, conflict resolution and emotional intelligence.
• Schedule time to develop relationships during specific and intentional times of the day.
• Ask questions and listen to demonstrate interest to your colleagues.
• Offer assistance when you notice colleagues are overwhelmed or burdened with a project. Also, ask for assistance on your own projects. These actions help to build trust and rapport.
• Appreciate everyone’s contributions to the team or organization in genuine and consistent ways.
• Keep your commitments to develop a reputation of being reliable and trustworthy.
• Be present at work to ensure you are paying attention to those around you. This helps you establish communication and get to know your colleagues better, which could lead to building workplace relationships with minimal effort.

Consider incorporating these steps into workplace relationships to start seeing improved results. To learn more about building and managing relationships at work, consider checking out resources such as the Learning Trove Library for access to recorded webinars on related topics such as “Interpersonal Skills” and “The Power of Active Listening.”