Building and maintaining strong and caring relationships both at home with our family and at work with our colleagues is critical to our personal happiness and success every day of the year. And if you don’t pay attention to these relationships on a daily basis, cracks will begin to appear and the relationships will eventually falter.

Then again, some people may pay close attention to their family relationships but fail to see the importance of paying close attention to their relationships at work. Since you spend a majority of your time at work, ensuring that work relationships are strong and effective is critical to career success.

These relationships are broad and complex. For instance, you have to build relationships with co-workers and your immediate manager, but at the same time, most people will also have to build relationships with customers or suppliers. For those in management, you will also have to build relationships with senior managers and executives and sometimes with a board of directors.

As well, most relationships include people from different disciplines and occupations and as business becomes more global, work relationships will expand and include different languages and cultures.

Although creating and maintaining an effective family relationship might result from basic instincts, instinct alone is not enough to build strong relationships in the work world. In fact, work related relationships need a conscious, systematic effort; in other words, it takes planning, strategy, time and plain hard work. First of all, you need to believe that building a web of relationships is indeed important and worth the effort that you will have to expend.

The following 10 guidelines will help to steer you in the right direction:

Listen and observe. Become a people watcher — listen, observe and learn about others. Pay attention to how they think, what is important to them, what they like to do and what they want out of life. Take care not to rush to judgment. Let people talk about themselves; invest time in listening and look for commonalities between you.

Show respect. Polish up your manners and be sure to use “please and thank you” generously. Show people that you care; avoid interrupting when someone is talking and allow your colleagues to express their feelings without replying so quickly with negative comments. Show that you value your colleague by avoiding gossip or divulging confidences.

Be generous. Teammates who always take are those who never seem to think about the needs of others and believe me, people quickly get tired of these individuals. Instead, recognize that relationships are built by being generous and helping others to achieve their goals.

Understand the boundaries. Every relationship has specific boundaries, areas where you must tread lightly or not tread at all. Boundaries are a form of self-protection and so you must pay attention to what both you and others feel is acceptable behaviour. Your workplace will have boundaries as well. Find out what they are and behave accordingly.

Create work allies. Allies are co-workers that you can count on to provide advice, give information or assist you when you need it. They can also act as your sounding board and support base. Allies are your friends and without allies, work can be a lonely place.

Be open and honest. Strong relationships are built on trust, rapport and honest communication. People whose conversation is one of “evade, shade or spin” will quickly lose the respect of others. Being open and honest builds trust and understanding.

Always be professional. Building relationships is all about what you do and how you do it. Being professional means showing a consistent high level of appropriate behaviour. In other words, you must continually look, talk and act like a professional by being dependable and trustworthy and having good self-control.

Treat everyone as an equal. It doesn’t matter what your colleague’s job is, each of the roles you play in your organization has value and must be respected as such. Appreciate your colleagues for what they do. Treat them as your equal.

Engage in healthy conflict resolution. Conflict will arise in any relationship. The challenge you will face is how to deal with it. The most effective means of dealing with conflict is to raise your issues early rather than letting them fester. Next, pay attention to applying a win/win solution so that each person will gain something.

Keep commitments. Be sure to do what you agreed to do and do it well. It doesn’t matter if your commitment is big or small; take all of your commitments seriously. Helping people to understand that they can count on you builds trust and respect.

Discussions around the issue of effective organizations typically focus on the need for competent and motivated employees, a shared vision and clear direction. Yet at the same time, the importance of interpersonal relationships within the workplace is often downplayed. However, organizations will be effective only when their people are effective and productive. And whereas instinct alone does not create strong relationships, organizations need to incorporate soft skills training into their workplace so that employees can gain concrete relationship building skills and apply a conscious and systematic effort.

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