How to build better professional relationships

Professional relationships are important – they may be the single most important thing in determining your success, second only to job-specific subject matter expertise.  What can you do to improve professional relationships?  The key to success here is focus – people fail to make headway in working on the effectiveness of their professional relationships when they try to treat the issue in general — trying to be more friendly or likable, or otherwise change their UI for everyone.  This doesn’t work very well because its hard to change the patterns of how you interact with everyone and once you fail at this a couple of dozen times, you get discouraged and stop trying.  So, after the jump, I’ll describe a strategy that works to improve the quality and effectiveness of your professional relationships.

Step 1: Brainstorm a list of professional relationships — Don’t over-think this.  Just jot down 10 or 20 names of the people that you work with.  They can be subordinates, peers or superiors.  They can be external customers, they can be your boss or your boss’ boss.  Jot them down on a list on the left hand side of a piece of paper. 

Step 2: Rate the effectiveness of the relationship — The effectiveness of the relationship stems from two key variables: the health of the relationship (h) and the impact of the relationship (i).  The health of the relationship is the extent to which you already have a good relationship with the person in question.  Do you trust them?  Do you like them?  Have you worked together before and been successful?  Does he or she like you and find you to be competent?  All of these things go into a general assessment of the health of each professional relationship.  Give ”h” — the value of this variable for each person, a score of between 1 and 10.  The ”impact” of this relationship is the extent to which it is important for your success and the success of the organization.  Do you depend on this person for a mission-critical piece of work?  Does this person influence your promotion timeline?  Do they know how to find resources that you need to get your work done?  All of these are element of impact.  Give the person and impact score (i) of between 1 and 10.

Step 3: Rank the importance of the relationship — For each of the 10 or 20 people you have written down, generate a number based on the following equation:

Relational Priority = 10+2(i)-h      

This equation double weights impact (because we want to focus on how you can get things done with relationship, not just how you can make more effective friendships) and inverts health (thus giving a less healthy relationship a higher priority to work on).

So, for example, if these are my numbers (Raw Scores):

When I rank order these raw scores, I get the following list:

In this example, who should I be focusing on? Helen and Alex, both high impact relationships.  I’ve got a good relationship with Jeff but additional efforts to make things even better are unlikely to yield much business impact.  Its simple, but this exercise will really help you assess the relationships where you should be focusing your energy.