Strengthening Interpersonal Relationships at Work

A strong network is one of the most crucial factors that not only help you establish a happy and healthy work environment for yourself, but also help you improve your career. Building a network begins with developing good interpersonal relationships with your colleagues and leaders, which allows you to interact with others from their networks.

As a result, one of the most important things to remember is that it is critical for you to maintain and deliberately establish interpersonal ties in the corporate world. In this YouTube video from the Harvard Business Review channel, Innovation editor Christine Liu discusses with Tyree Mitchell, assistant professor at Louisiana State University why trust is regarded as the building block of great interpersonal relationships and how to cultivate interpersonal relationships with colleagues.

Strengthen your interpersonal relationships at work

Christine makes one of the first and most significant points in this video: team cooperation is the major component that motivates teams to give their all in various projects.

However, she sees this as a bit difficult in the modern corporate environment, where teams have gone totally remote or hybrid and trust is the primary factor driving productivity. This is because, when your team is not working under your supervision, you must rely on their capacity to do tasks in the same manner and produce outcomes of the same quality as they would if they were working from the office.

When questioned about the fundamental pillars of trust as a determinant in major interpersonal relationships, Mitchell says that the three judgments we normally make about whether someone is trustworthy boil down to judging ability, benevolence, and integrity.

Ability is determined by evaluating whether or not the other individual can do the task at hand. Benevolence is the ability to determine whether the other person has good intentions for you and the initiatives. In contrast, integrity is the certainty that the other person follows particular ideals. Using a team charter is one of the first ideas he suggests for evaluating these three characteristics, which ultimately aids in the improvement of interpersonal relationships.

A team charter specifies what is expected of team members in terms of the job at hand, as well as their responses and questions about it. This enables team members to communicate effectively, developing trust in one another’s abilities. He also advises against making commitments that you would later find difficult to keep. This will free you of the burden of under-delivery. As a result, you must be able to disagree politely at work.

Second, he advocates owning up to mistakes rather than blaming them on other causes. Furthermore, he proposes doing activities that may not be in your best interests right now.

Finally, if your trust in someone has been damaged, Tyrell proposes mending it by granting them access to monitor your work so that they can be certain of no mismanagements and can readily trust your competence again.

Interpersonal relationships are a vital component that requires your attention. It may be difficult to create trust, which is one of its major building components. The suggestions above are a few ways to create trust with your team members.