Relationships: What's In It For Me?

Building relationships is something I love doing. Effectively working and collaborating with others is something that continually ranks as a strength area for me in both performance reviews at work and various interpersonal evaluations I’ve done. I think working in a team is the best way to get work accomplished because it allows you to brainstorm together and come up with the best idea made up of a combination of a number of group members’ thoughts. I’m a firm believer in the “Together Everyone Accomplishes More” TEAM acronym. Someone is bound to think of an angle you never considered, and together, you can shape one person’s thought into a whole project. This semester I took Managing Collaborative Relationships with Professor Shuman. This class taught me to take a deeper look at the relationships that I have built, the experiences I’ve had working on teams, and my approach to building relationships and ask the question: “What’s in it for me?” Building a rapport with people is important. It makes people want to work with you and it makes them trust you, and both are key factors to successful collaborations. But the “what’s in it for me” forces me to think about what I can get out of these relationships. Collaborations are all about the gives and the gets, but up until this class, I had really only considered what I could give in a relationship. I need to refocus how I approach relationships and think about what I can get out of these relationships. Does this person work on a team that has resources I may need to tap into on an upcoming project? Does this person have expertise in an area that I do not? Does this person have other connections that they can refer me to when I’m looking for information? It’s not selfish to approach relationships this way — building relationships with the right people can be a recipe for success on a difficult project.