# How to Build a Good Working Relationship With Colleagues Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/working-relationship-with-colleagues/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/working-relationship-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 A working relationship with colleagues is built on trust, respect and open communication. What good ones look like, and how to build yours from scratch. ## Key facts - Title: How to Build a Good Working Relationship With Colleagues - Category: Networking - Primary skill: Networking - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: working relationship with colleagues - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/working-relationship-with-colleagues/ ## What this page covers - A working relationship with colleagues is built on trust, respect and open communication. What good ones look like, and how to build yours from scratch. - Practical guidance for working relationship with colleagues - How this topic connects to Networking ## Detailed explanation You can sit near the same people for months, exchange the same few sentences every morning, and still feel like you are on the outside of something everyone else was let into earlier. A working relationship with colleagues is the ongoing professional connection you hold with the people you work alongside, and its quality is judged by [mutual trust](/knowledge/teamwork/build-trust-at-work/), respect, honest communication, and how easily the two of you get work finished together. It is built through small repeated behaviors, not through personality or chemistry. That last part is worth sitting with, because it means the people who seem to find this effortless are mostly doing a short list of ordinary things consistently — and almost none of those things require being the most outgoing person in the room. ## What counts as a good working relationship with colleagues? It helps to start by shrinking the target. Indeed draws a distinction between a colleague and a co-worker: colleagues are the people you work with directly and see most days, while co-workers are anyone else at the organization you may never interact with. You are not trying to build a relationship with the whole company, only a handful with the people whose work touches yours. As for what makes one of those relationships good, Mindtools names five ingredients: trust, respect, self-awareness, inclusion, and open communication. Four of those are about the space between you. The fifth is not, and it is the one most lists leave out — self-awareness is there because a meaningful share of any strained relationship is your own reactions and blind spots rather than the other person's behavior. Notice too that the ability to complete tasks together sits inside the definition. A good working relationship is not a warm feeling that happens to occur at work; it is a connection that makes the work move. ## Why do working relationships with colleagues matter this much? The payoff described across the ranking sources comes in four parts. Work moves faster when you already understand how someone prefers to be approached. Satisfaction and morale rise, because most of your waking hours are spent in this company. People stay longer. And opportunities tend to arrive through people who have seen your work up close. The inverse is the part worth noticing. Both Indeed and BetterUp make the point that people leave jobs — sometimes entire industries — because of the colleagues rather than the work itself. The work you were hired to do is rarely what decides whether you want to keep doing it. One honest caveat: these are directional claims from career-advice publishers, not figures from a named study, so treat them as a consistent pattern rather than a measured one. ## How do I build relationships when I'm new and everyone already knows each other? There is an asymmetry at the center of this, and Michael Page names it plainly in its advice for new starters: your colleagues are already inside an established set of relationships, so if you wait for them to come to you, establishing yourself takes considerably longer. Nobody else experiences your arrival as urgent — not out of coldness, but because their week is already full. Which means the initiative has to come from you — and if you have been reading your own passivity as politeness, it is worth reframing. Introducing yourself and [starting conversations](/knowledge/networking/small-talk-tips/) is ordinary behavior for a new person, not pushy behavior. The practical difficulty is that "be proactive" rarely survives contact with a busy day. Indeed's suggestion is to give the relationship an actual slot: the first ten minutes of the workday, lunch, or the walk out at the end of the day. Any of the three works; the point is that it stops being an intention and starts fitting in your calendar next to everything else. And when you are in that slot, ask questions and listen properly — asking a colleague what they are stuck on or what they need this week does more for a relationship than anything you could say about yourself. ## Do I have to be friends with my colleagues? No, and it is worth separating the two, because much of the anxiety here comes from assuming "relationship" means "friendship." It does not. A strong working relationship can consist entirely of trust, reliability, and easy communication, with no social contact outside working hours at all. Friendship at work is a genuine benefit when it happens naturally, but Psychology Today points out a real pitfall in the close version: pairing up so tightly with one colleague that the two of you become effectively indistinguishable. When that happens you lose the chance to be seen as an individual contributor, and your reputation becomes tied to someone else's. So aim for breadth over depth, at least early on — several decent relationships across the people your work touches will serve you better than one intense alliance. ## How much personal information should I share at work? This is the question most sources skip, and it has a usable answer. Idealist's rule of thumb is to be personal but keep your privacy, with a test attached: would you be comfortable if what you just said were repeated to everyone in the office? That test is useful because it replaces an unanswerable question — "how open should I be?" — with a single check you can run before you speak. Sharing that you are nervous about a presentation, or that your commute is brutal, passes easily. Sharing a grievance about a third colleague does not, and that kind of sharing damages more working relationships than reticence ever has. ## How do I build a working relationship with a colleague I don't like? Focus on the working half. You do not have to warm to someone to be reliable with them, clear with them, and fair about their contribution — and those three things are most of what a functional relationship requires. It also helps to check the direction of the friction before you assign it. This is where self-awareness earns its place on Mindtools' list: some of what reads as a difficult colleague is your own pattern of interpreting them, which is hard to see from the inside. If you have had a version of the same friction in more than one workplace, that is a signal rather than a coincidence — and an outside [read on your own habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) answers it faster than another year of guessing. One thing to avoid entirely: talking about the person to others. [Complaining about a colleague](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/workplace-gossip/) damages relationships you were not even in conflict with, because it tells everyone in earshot how you would talk about them. ## Can a working relationship survive a disagreement? Yes — and relationships never tested by one are usually shallower than they look. A team where nobody ever pushes back is a team making worse decisions. What determines survival is not whether you disagree but how. Stay on the substance and keep it off the person. Say the disagreeable thing once, properly, rather than letting it leak out sideways for weeks. And once a decision is made, commit to it fully even if it was not your preference — arguing for your position and then implementing it loyally is what makes people trust your disagreement next time. If trust does dip, name it early and reset; working relationships are damaged less by a single sharp exchange than by the silence that follows it. ## What if I'm making the effort and my colleagues aren't? First, check the timescale. Relationships at work build over months, and a few weeks of feeling unreciprocated is normal rather than diagnostic — especially if the people around you are heads-down on something. Second, look at what you are actually offering. Giving value without expecting an immediate return is the mechanism that makes this work: sharing information someone needs, taking a piece of a colleague's load in a bad week, connecting two people who should be talking. These are investments, not transactions, and they rarely come back on the same day. And the single highest-return behavior on the list is acknowledging what colleagues contribute. [Giving credit](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/words-of-appreciation-for-coworkers/) appears in nearly every source on this topic, and it is the only item that costs nothing and requires no social confidence — which makes it the natural starting point if the more sociable advice does not fit how you operate. ## The skills underneath all of this Read those eight answers back and the same few capabilities keep surfacing under different questions. Taking the first step with someone new, being the person whose commitments hold, knowing what to say about an absent colleague — these are not eight separate problems. They are a small number of learnable behaviors showing up in eight situations. **Networking**, in the sense that matters here, has almost nothing to do with events or LinkedIn. It is about building relationships before you need them, with the colleagues you already have, by giving value rather than trading favors. It also gives you a way to think about maintenance: some relationships need active attention now, others have enough established trust to go quiet for months and still be there when you reach out. **Teamwork** supplies the part everyone gestures at and few people define. Trust is not a mood; it is built by being sincere, reliable, authentic, and willing to forgive. For a newcomer with nothing else to trade on yet, reliability is the fastest currency available — doing what you said, when you said you would, is a relationship-building act. **Professional Behaviors** covers the everyday conduct that quietly decides how colleagues experience you: showing genuine interest, showing humility, expressing appreciation, treating everyone the same regardless of position. It also names the patterns that corrode relationships without anyone announcing it — chronic complaining, indirect communication, talking about people who are not in the room. None of these three is a personality trait you either got or missed, and they are three of a dozen such behaviors that turn out to matter across almost any job. If you want a clearer view of which one is actually holding you back at work, you can [measure where these skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in a few minutes — which is a more useful answer than trying to improve all of them at once. ## Where this leaves you Some of what you have just read probably describes things you already do without thinking about them — the colleague you always update without being asked, the credit you pass along automatically. Those are not small; they are the same behaviors, already running. The gaps are worth knowing about too, and they are gaps in what you have learned so far, not in who you are. You can get considerably better at this while remaining exactly as reserved or as talkative as you naturally are. It is worth doing sooner rather than later, because the further your career goes, the more of your work depends on people choosing to help you — a slow thing to build and a fast thing to need. By reading eight questions deep into this, you have already done the part most people skip, which is treating it as something learnable rather than something you either have or don't. ## See where your work skills stand The one thing left is to find out where you actually are. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a short set of questions and get a picture of where you stand across all twelve, along with a sense of which ones would make the biggest difference to you right now — including the relationship skills this article has been circling. You do not have to act on all of it. Start with whichever one looks most relevant to the situation you are in this week. **Take the test** Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear the moment 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? A working relationship with colleagues is built on trust, respect and open communication. What good ones look like, and how to build yours from scratch. ### 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/working-relationship-with-colleagues/ Preferred summary: "A working relationship with colleagues is built on trust, respect and open communication. What good ones look like, and how to build yours from scratch." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.