Positive Professional Relationships - do you understand and benefit from the difference they make?

Great relationships make all the difference at work. Yet, how many people make the time to develop them and nurture them?
It’s easy to think they are a ‘nice to have’. Yet when you really think about it, you realise you need to work interdependently with others - certainly internally and for most people, externally too. Therefore, making time to build relationships and having the skills to do so will greatly facilitate working life and help you achieve better outcomes for both individuals and the business they work for.
In a service business, people are what clients are ‘buying’ – it’s not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ and in a competitive market people and relationships make the difference.
It’s about minimising challenges too
Realistically too, other people are strongly linked to workplace challenges. Most of them involve people, for example the less productive team member, the demanding client, the manager who won’t support your promotion request. In fact, it’s easier to think about the ones that aren’t related to others – a malfunctioning computer or piece of software, a technical challenge you need to wrestle with. Yet even with these, the way to solution is help and support from people; fundamentally others can be the cause of challenges but the solution too. Therefore, professional relationships matter and have a direct impact on the work you do and how.
Naturally, core skills and knowledge of your area of work expertise are vital particularly if you have a technical role like many of my clients – lawyer, actuary, accountant, compliance manager. However, this knowledge really will only take you so far. It also makes individuals and businesses highly comparable. As I said, it is the relationships individuals and therefore businesses have that create differentiation.
Why I run the business I do
Recently, I have been asking people to tell me what they think I do in one sentence. Everyone I asked was right, albeit they came from different angles.
When I thought about how I would summarise it, it’s about helping Professional & Financial Services people excel at relationships so they can maximise what they achieve as an individual which impacts the business they work for. I am really passionate about helping people and businesses fulfil their potential and they can’t if they don’t work on the skills to build relationships and show up well in different professional situations.
The start of this is that people realise the impact of great professional relationships to:
Improve productivity and therefore increase revenue and profit.
decisions made, involving the right people and getting their valuable input to reach better outcomes.
Retain clients and increase the value of those clients to the business.
Bring in new clients.
Retain top talent.
Develop careers.
Create a more positive work culture.
Many of these are interlinked but nevertheless it is an important list. Who wouldn’t want all of these benefits in their business? Which individual wouldn’t want to feel valued, work in a positive environment and be able to develop their career?
Positive professional relationships are not simply a ‘nice to have’.
Important considerations
The starting point to relationships is making the time then thinking about your personal impact so how you communicate yourself to others and engage with them. This needs to take into account different situations and means of communication e.g. in person, Teams calls, emails, your LinkedIn profile…
Then there are core skills to developing relationships – to be able to work well with different people and naturally specific skills are needed for different professional situations.
Hence why I run training and speak on personal impact and then focus on different situational skills, that need to be developed, such as giving and receiving feedback, having difficult conversations, navigating office politics, engaging effectively with clients, networking confidently and positively at events…the list goes on!
Getting started
Have you considered all the benefits of great professional relationships listed above? Have you thought about how you and your people can improve? In which situations? Which skills are missing?
Very few people are naturally great at relationship skills in all situations all of the time so there are always elements to work on.
If you’d like to talk to me about what development your people could benefit from to improve internal working and grow your business, or you are looking for an engaging speaker for your next event to get people focused, get in touch for a no obligation conversation.