Sabotage Relationships, Harm Collaboration

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Relationships at work enrich our time and make better outcomes possible. But they are easily damaged by common behaviours. Whilst it takes effort to sustain healthy connections, the human and business rewards are immense.

How we sabotage relationships

Workplace relationships matter for two reasons: first, when going well they make our days more enjoyable and also promote psychological well-being. Second, relationships aid team cohesion and help us get things done.

Thinking of work, our minds often turn to vision and strategy. goals and outcomes, costs and budgets – the paraphernalia of management and bureaucracy.

Whilst mechanics grab the attention, for many the workplace is a community of human relationships. The ‘invisible work’ of human dynamics, an idea championed by Katherine Handy-Woods of Meeting Magic, matters most:

Making the invisible visible

Five ways we sabotage relationships

Workplace relationships are fragile and easily harmed, through lack of skills, by not paying attention, or because we feel personal connections are not worth the effort.

Below are five ways we sabotage relationships, making work less healthy and productive for ourselves and others:

Pull rank: use formal authority to get our way, rather than guiding people through credibility, influence, and reason;

Naysay every idea: a critical eye is welcome, but no one likes to work with the person who sees every glass as half full;

Indulge in gossip: informal conversation is the lifeblood of effective work, whilst gossip soon or late makes us everyone’s enemy;

Break promises: trust flies out of the window whenever we fail to do what we promise, say, or even suggest we will do;

Fall prey to hypocrisy: worse than a broken promise is to hold others to account to standards we ourselves fail to meet.

For more thoughts on these problematic behaviours, read my short article: Five ways to sabotage relationships at work.

Make collaboration easier

Why care so much about relationships at work?

Few roles deliver value all on their own – Sales relies on Marketing; Marketing relies on Research; Research relies on IT; IT relies on Compliance; everyone relies on Finance and Human Resources, and so on.

Collaboration matters. And, despite the hype, tech is rarely the answer, as I write in this article on protecting relationships in the age of AI.

Relationships typically beat systems as a way to connect people across departments and hierarchies. Likewise, to talk (literally!) across teams is an invaluable way to manage unforeseen risks.