How to Build Good Relationships Inside and Outside Your Engineering Team
Building good relationships with your colleagues will make your work experience SO much better!
Intro
Being able to build good relationships with your team and the people that you are working with, makes it SO much easier to collaborate and work together.
On the other hand, if you don’t do this, it can cause a lot of uncertainties and issues.
Let’s get more into the WHY next.
Why should you focus on building good relationships?
One of the common things I see from low-performer engineers is that they are building things in isolation.
They don’t ask for help or they don’t want to clarify their plan of tackling a certain project with their colleagues. The side-effect of this is that they are not building the RIGHT things, therefore their impact is much lower.
They haven’t been able to build good enough relationships with their colleagues to feel comfortable doing that or their ego gets in their way.
On the contrary, engineers who are considered high performers often have two things:
Their overall skillset is at a high level.
They have good communication & collaboration abilities which helps them build good relationships with their colleagues.
So, building good relationships is a prerequisite to success in the role.
Remember, Software Development is a team sport and relationships play a huge part in contributing effectively.
Let’s continue with the very important thing to always keep in mind!
What you give is what you get
Good relationships are always reciprocal. You get back exactly what you give. The way you treat your colleagues, the similar treatment you are going to receive in return.
Therefore, here are some examples:
Trust your team members -> you will receive trust in return,
Be respectful to everyone -> everyone will be respectful to you,
Show that you care about the codebase -> others will care about it as well.
Make sure that your actions mimic exactly what you wish to get in return.
Now that we covered the very important mindset to have, let’s get into more detail on how you can build good relationships with your colleagues.
Be genuinely interested in getting to know your colleagues better
By doing this, you are building a great foundation to collaborate effectively. And great collaboration leads to great results.
Here are my recommendations:
Don’t just focus on discussing work-related things.
If you just focus on work-related things only, you are missing out on getting to know your colleagues better, which is a limitation. If you know your colleagues better, that creates a great environment for you to collaborate well.
Spend some time talking about personal topics.
This can be anything, from hobbies, the weekend, family, kids, sports, etc. Especially recommend taking a couple of minutes before jumping to work-related things.
Try to find common interests.
Finding a common interest is a great way to bond. Like for example if both of you like basketball, it’s much more likely that you will have a much better time collaborating.
Remember, your impact is not only judged by your own contribution but also based on the success of the whole team and good relationships matter to achieve that.
This is also a very important advice when you start your new role as an engineer. One of the first things you should focus on is to start building relationships with your team and the people that you are directly working with.
You can read more about how you can thrive in your first 90 days as an engineer in your new role here: Thrive in your first 90 days when starting a new position as an engineer (paid article).