Building relationships at work

How to communicate with your network

As a junior engineer at Gousto, I have the opportunity to attend bi-monthly training days which help me and my colleagues build on our strengths and develop our careers.

The theme for this month’s workshop was communication and building relationships at work, skills which are essential at every level of your career but especially when you are new to a company and keen to learn as much as possible.

The workshop covered different relationship types, building trust, developing rapport, finding your personal boardroom, communication styles, and how to be a good listener.

Relationship Types

You can build several kinds of relationships at work which have different roles in your life and career:

• A mentor
• A coach
• Peers
• Colleagues in your team
• Friends
• Leadership teams
• Sponsors
• Guilds
• Social clubs

These can be individual or group relationships, many of which are interconnected. You might work closely with a colleague who is also a member of the same club as you, or ask one of the company’s leaders to become your coach.

It’s important to remember how valuable this network is, both personally and professionally, and how you can use your connections to help you grow in your career.

Growing your career

You need both people and technical skills in order to advance in your career as a software engineer. You can’t be great at your job if you find it difficult to communicate what you’ve done, and your networking skills won’t be much use if you aren’t particularly good at your job. At Gousto, we use both an engineering skills and a competency matrix to develop our career.

You should learn to be proud of your achievements, explaining the impact our work has on both the squad and company’s goals to increase exposure and advance your career.

It can be hard to promote yourself all the time, but it will help raise awareness of the good work you’ve done. I keep an achievements list, which helps me recognise my achievements and communicate them with my manager in our 1–to-1s.

Trust

The relationships you build at work are nothing without trust. Trust builds a culture of honesty, mutual respect and psychological safety which enables you to speak up without fear of judgement or discrimination.

The Trust Equation was first devised by The Trusted Advisor and covers the most common meanings of trust you find in work interactions.

Trustworthiness Equation (source: Trusted Advisor Associates)

• Credibility: they have knowledge on the subject
• Reliability: they’ll do what they say they’ll do
• Intimacy: they won’t share vulnerable information or break confidentiality
• Self-Orientation: they are focused on themselves

Increasing the factors in the numerator increases the value of trust. Increasing self-orientation decreases the value of trust. Most people tend to rely on credibility and reliability to build trust relationships, but the other two factors are arguably more important.

Rapport

Rapport is about relationships in action: connecting with people on a personal level to build effective working relationships. It’s often based on common interests or a sense of relatedness, understanding who your colleagues are outside of work and what is important to them. You can use this personal relationship to constructively influence a colleague and have more success.

Some tips to build rapport:

• Ask your colleague about their personal life
• Actively listen to them
• Remember details and bring them up later on
• Follow up and book in a coffee or a meeting to catch up
• Share something about yourself
• Show appreciation

Rapport is more about establishing a bond or connection, whereas trust is more about building a reputation of reliability and consistency.

Tony Robbins has some great advice about building rapport to improve professional relationships.

Building Your Personal Boardroom

You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with. The concept of the Personal Boardroom is a tool to change the way you think about your network. You can use it to identify a handful of people who can help you succeed.

Personal Boardroom (source: https://www.personalboardroom.com)

There are 12 different roles in your personal boardroom:

Information roles: provide new knowledge, insight and ideas

• Customer Voice
• Expert
• Inspirer
• Navigator

Power roles: provide access to people and resources and get things done

• Unlocker
• Sponsor
• Influencer
• Connector

Development roles: provide feedback, challenge, courage and balance

• Improver
• Challenger
• Nerve-giver
• Anchor

To build your personal boardroom, you must first define your goal. For example, mine is to progress to the next stage of my career.

You can identify certain gaps or traps and think about how you might overcome them.

Next, you choose 6–12 people who can help you move towards this goal, assigning each of them one of the roles above.

You can then reach out to these people and ask them to help and support you on your journey.

Investing time wisely in these people will mean you can do less networking and spend more time working towards your goal.

You can also ask yourself these questions about each of the members of your boardroom:

• How close is our relationship? Is it distant or intimate?
• How often do we interact? Daily, monthly, or less frequently?
• What’s their relationship to us? Are they in our team, function, company, industry?

It is important to diversity your network, receiving support from people close to you but also those with different backgrounds and experiences.

You should also work to maintain these relationships, perhaps reaching out to inform them about your current goals and asking if they can support or advise you.

Communication

What makes a great conversation? Or perhaps more importantly, what makes a bad conversation? It’s hard to engage with someone when they are multi-tasking, when they are distracted (no phones during meetings!), or when they have entered the conversation with preconceived ideas.

It’s a good idea to think about a conversation before you enter it, understanding what it is you hope to get out of the meeting.

If you’re asking someone for help, there are three things that will motivate them to agree to help you:

• The cause
• The challenge
• The fact that it’s you asking them and you have a rapport (see above)

It can be useful to know if the person you are approaching will be influenced more by a task or a purpose. Would they like to help you reach a goal, or are they more motivated by helping you to learn something? For a task-led person, you might approach them and say “I would like to achieve x by y” but with a purpose-led person, it might be better to ask a question: “have you seen examples of x?” or “have you done this before?”

Your success rate in a conversation is influenced by your words, tone of voice, and body language. It can be harder to have a difficult conversation online, as the person you’re talking to can’t see your body. It might be worth bearing this in mind and going into the office on days you want to broach something with a colleague.

There are 7 Cs for effective messaging:

• Clear
• Concise
• Concrete
• Correct
• Coherent
• Complete
• Courteous

If you combine these tips, the members of your boardroom should be more than happy to support you to achieve your goals.

Listening

Communication is a two-way street and you must learn to listen as well as to speak to others. There is a difference between listening and hearing, and you can do certain things to ensure you are more engaged when talking to your colleagues:

• Maintain eye contact
• Don’t interrupt people when they are talking (at Gousto, we like to raise a hand on Google Meets if we would like to ask a question while someone is talking)
• Remove distractions — don’t look at your phone or try to multitask
• Check you’ve understood their point before you take action or make judgement — you might want to repeat their last words back to them, making them feel listened to
• Ask questions
• Don’t start planning what you are going to say before they have finished talking
• Follow up on the conversation afterwards

Conclusion

Using these tips, you should be able to build stronger relationships at work, setting yourself up for success.

Here are my personal takeaways and action points from the workshop:

• Follow up with members of my personal boardroom, asking for their support to help me fill gaps
• Identify particular goals I would like to achieve and communicate these effectively, using the 7Cs
• Remove distractions during meetings to become a better and more engaged listener