# Building Relationships With Colleagues: Where to Start and What Comes Next Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/building-relationships-with-colleagues/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/building-relationships-with-colleagues.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving networking at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Building relationships with colleagues rarely happens on its own. Eight practical steps, from the first real conversation to keeping the contact warm. ## Key facts - Title: Building Relationships With Colleagues: Where to Start and What Comes Next - Category: Networking - Primary skill: Networking - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: building relationships with colleagues - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/building-relationships-with-colleagues/ ## What this page covers - Building relationships with colleagues rarely happens on its own. Eight practical steps, from the first real conversation to keeping the contact warm. - Practical guidance for building relationships with colleagues - How this topic connects to Networking ## Detailed explanation You can be good at your job and still be the person nobody quite knows. Six months in, you have everyone's name and almost none of their story. Building relationships with colleagues follows much the same shape in almost every workplace: you initiate rather than wait, you use early conversations to learn about their work instead of promoting your own, you follow up quickly, you offer something before you need anything, and you keep the contact alive after the novelty wears off. It is a sequence, not a personality trait. The sequence is the part most advice leaves out. ## Why building relationships with colleagues is worth deliberate effort The payoff is better documented than you might expect. Gallup finds that people who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are seven times as engaged in their jobs, and that having a best friend at work makes someone 43% more likely to report being recognized for their work in the past week. That second number is the quietly important one: recognition is partly a byproduct of connection, because a close colleague both notices what you did and mentions it to other people. A KPMG survey of full-time professional employees found much the same from the inside — 83% said work friendships made them feel more engaged, 81% more satisfied in their jobs, and 80% more connected to their workplace, and 43% named close work friendships as the professional relationship with the greatest positive effect on their mental health. Reporting by the World Economic Forum has also tied having many coworkers who became friends to higher performance ratings from supervisors. So the case for bothering is settled. What the advice rarely gives you is order. Search this topic and the same behaviors come back again and again — listen actively, be transparent, show appreciation, don't gossip — presented as a menu rather than a sequence. A menu doesn't tell you what to do on Monday morning. The steps below do, and they work whether you started last week or three years ago. ## Eight steps to building relationships with colleagues ### 1. Map who you actually work with Before you talk to anyone, spend ten minutes writing down the people your work genuinely touches: the ones you depend on to get things done, the ones who depend on you, and the ones whose decisions shape your week. Most people are surprised by how short the list is, and by how many names on it they have never had a real conversation with. That list is your starting order. You are not trying to know everyone in the building, only the people already standing closest to you. ### 2. Make the first move, and expect to be the one who makes it Guides written for new joiners are blunt about this, and Michael Page puts it plainly: the people already in the team have established relationships and no particular prompt to reach out, so the initiative has to come from you. That stays true long after you stop being the new person. The move itself is small — asking someone for twenty minutes to understand what they actually do, or joining the lunch that has been happening without you every Wednesday. An occasion that already exists is easier to join than one you have to invent. And it usually feels more awkward in advance than in the moment; the awkwardness is not evidence you are doing it wrong. ### 3. Use the first conversation to learn, not to pitch The instinct in a first real conversation is to explain yourself — your role, your background, what you are working on. Resist it. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley suggests keeping a few go-to questions in your pocket and asking them routinely: what's going well, what they're looking forward to, what's been a highlight of their work. Then actually listen to the answer. Make eye contact, restate the key point back to check you understood it, and ask one follow-up question instead of switching to your own story. People remember being asked about far longer than they remember being told about, and you learn something you can use in step four. ### 4. Follow up within a day A conversation you never follow up on is a pleasant half hour that leaves nothing behind. Within about twenty-four hours, send something short and specific: the article they said they wanted, the introduction you offered, or two lines about what stuck with you from what they told you. Specificity is what separates a follow-up from a formality — a generic "good to talk" gives the other person nothing to reply to. This is the cheapest step on the list and the one most often skipped, and it is what turns a single conversation into a relationship that has a next time. ### 5. Give something before you need anything Networking has a bad name mostly because people only do it when they want something, and it shows. The correction is a small habit of giving with nothing attached: forwarding information a colleague would find useful, sharing a shortcut or a tool you worked out, introducing two people who should know each other, covering for someone in a crunch, or just listening properly on a bad day. None of it costs much and it accumulates. It also removes most of the discomfort from later requests, because approaching someone you have already helped feels completely different from approaching someone you have only ever taken from. ### 6. Become the colleague people can count on The first five steps build acquaintance. Trust is built by something duller: doing what you said you would do, saying what you actually think, and being recognizably the same person regardless of who is in the room. Across the advice on this topic, trust is described as something you extend first — having confidence in a colleague is what tends to earn theirs — and something you demonstrate by acting on what people tell you rather than merely hearing it. Most of us overestimate how reliable we look from the outside, which is exactly why it helps to know [which of these come easily](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) to you before trying to change all eight steps at once. These are behaviors, not fixed traits, so they respond to practice. ### 7. Widen the circle beyond your own team The 90-day guides written for new hires and new managers all follow the same expansion order: your immediate team first, usually through one-on-one conversations with each person, then peers in other departments, then the wider stakeholders you depend on occasionally. That order is worth borrowing even if you have been in the role for years, because cross-functional outreach lands better once you have a settled team identity to introduce yourself from. Once your own team feels solid, pick one person a month in a function you rely on but rarely speak to — finance, IT, whoever sits upstream of your work — and ask for the same twenty minutes. These are the relationships that quietly make your job easier, because they turn "raising a ticket" into "asking someone you know." ### 8. Keep the contact warm Relationships at work lapse by default rather than by decision; one busy quarter is usually enough. The counterweight is scheduling. Indeed suggests carving out specific windows — lunch, the first ten minutes of the workday, the walk out at the end of it — on the reasoning that relationships never form in the leftover gaps of a full calendar. Put a recurring note in your calendar to check in with two or three people you have not spoken to in a month. It will feel mechanical for a couple of weeks and then stop feeling like anything. Not everyone needs the same maintenance either: a few people you stay genuinely close to, a wider group you check in with now and then, and a further group you simply stay on good terms with. ## What actually makes this harder than it looks Read back through those eight steps and the difficulty concentrates in three places: starting, deepening, and not quietly undoing your own work. **Networking** is the part that says relationships get built before you need them, not at the moment you need them. It also offers a more realistic picture of what "well connected" means than the word usually suggests: not a long contact list, but a small inner group you actively keep up with, a middle group who will respond when you ask, and a wider circle that goes dormant until it doesn't. Feeling uncomfortable about making the first approach is normal and it is not disqualifying — that discomfort tends to fade through repetition rather than waiting for confidence to show up first. **Teamwork** is where acquaintance turns into trust, and it is more specific than it sounds: being sincere, being reliable, being consistent, and letting things go when a colleague gets something wrong. It also covers the moves that deepen a relationship faster than any conversation can — sharing what you know instead of guarding it, stepping in when someone is underwater, and making sure credit lands where it belongs rather than where it is loudest. **Professional Behaviors** is the floor the other two stand on. It is showing genuine interest in people, socializing in a way that fits your workplace, saying thank you out loud, and talking about absent colleagues the way you would if they were in the room. It also names what quietly corrodes relationships: gossip, steady complaining, and treating some people as more worth your attention than others. You can execute all eight steps well and still lose ground here. None of the three is something you either have or don't. They sit alongside nine others in a set of work skills that the free Job Skills Test covers in a single pass — which is a more useful thing to see than three skills in isolation, because you find out [how these three fit in](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with everything else that shapes how you work with people. Some of this probably already describes you. Maybe you are the one who remembers what someone mentioned last week, or who sends the file across before anybody asks for it. Most people turn out to be further along than they assumed; what is usually missing is not warmth but sequence. And nothing in these eight steps asks you to become more outgoing than you are. The colleagues who end up genuinely well connected are rarely the loudest ones — they are the ones who kept doing small, unglamorous things consistently, which is a version of yourself you can grow into without changing who you are. It also counts for more as you go rather than less: the work you get offered, the problems you hear about early, and the people who put your name forward all travel through these relationships, which is an argument for starting now, while nothing much depends on it yet. You have already done the part most people skip, which is treating this as something to learn rather than something you were either handed or not. ## Find out which step is your weak link The open question is a narrow one: of those eight steps, which is the one actually holding you back? You don't have to guess at it. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills sitting underneath everything above — networking, teamwork, professional behaviors and nine more — and it shows you where each one currently stands, so you can see which single skill would make the most difference to how connected you feel at work. It takes about seven minutes, there is nothing to prepare, and you do it entirely on your own. Then start small: one skill, one colleague, one week. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results are shown as soon as you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Building relationships with colleagues rarely happens on its own. Eight practical steps, from the first real conversation to keeping the contact warm. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Networking. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/building-relationships-with-colleagues/ Preferred summary: "Building relationships with colleagues rarely happens on its own. Eight practical steps, from the first real conversation to keeping the contact warm." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.