Your professional life can change considerably if the relationships involved are positive, productive and profitable. Although this may sound too idealistic, you can strive for great workplace relations.

Positive workplace skills

To be successful in creating meaningful relationships, you have to develop some positive skills, for example:

    • Try to understand every person that you have a relation with as the unique individual he or she is
    • Seek first to understand others and then to be understood
    • Use positive communication strategies.

Understanding personality styles

Having a good understanding of others helps us adjust our behaviour to be able to get along well with them and therefore build a good relationship. Understanding someone’s uniqueness can be accomplished by having an awareness that people have different personality behavioural styles, for example aggressive, friendly, remote, etc. Each of these styles has distinct, predictable and observable behaviour patterns. Once you understand these personality styles, you will enhance your ability to get along with almost anyone.

Personality style studies have been around for years. There are several modalities; however the best one may be the well known “Treat others as they wish to be treated”.

When you can identify a person’s dominant personality style, you can make minor adjustments to your own behaviour to relate better with that person. For example, usually a director style is very direct and to the point. The key desire is results. So if you are approaching a director in a conversation to request money for your office budget, you should use a strategy of being direct and showing him or her how giving you the money would benefit the bottom line results. Short, sweet, and to the point, indicating the results with the request – just as a director wants to hear it.

You may be in a much better position of being successful with your request if you meet your audience on their personality style turf, even though you may be of a different personality style. This is more positive, more productive and much more profitable. Try it! First you will need to learn more about personality styles, however as you learn to listen for clues from other people, the better trained you will become at reading people before engaging in conversation.

Empathetic listening

Research shows that most of the time we don’t communicate, we just take turns talking. Since the basic need of a human being is the need to be understood, listening is more important than talking when building a relationship with someone. Real empathetic listening means that you are doing more than hearing someone’s words. It means that you seek to understand what they are saying and will provide feedback once you have digested what they are telling you. This ensures that you understand what has been said and that the person speaking feels like he or she has been understood.

When we feel that we have been understood, we are likely to feel better about the relationship, resulting in more productive relations.

The next time you have an opportunity to communicate with someone, tell him or her that you would like to listen to them first, thereby giving yourself the opportunity to gain a good understanding of what they are communicating to you. Once you offer feedback to what you have heard and the speaker feels that he/she has been understood, you will be in a good position to begin the final step of building strong and positive relations.

Positive communication

Forming positive messages is more attainable when you can begin with the end in mind, meaning you have an idea in your mind of what the positive relationship would look like. Strategies recommended for positive relations include the following:

    • Making the other person feel good about him/herself and their contribution
    • Recognising a person in a positive and genuine way
    • Starting on a positive note with a genuine compliment and continue from there.

Reap the benefits of good relationships

To recap, these positive workplace relations techniques – understanding who it is you are communicating with, empathically listening to them first, and returning some positive communication – means that your relations are sure to be more positive, productive and profitable. Although these points are pretty much common sense, they are not necessarily common practice. Make a conscious effort to put them into play in your workplace and your personal life and reap the benefits that strong and positive relationships have to offer.

Our Employee Wellbeing Programme (EAP) is available 24 hours a day if you want to know more about relationships in the workplace.