Meaningful connection at work has quietly become scarce. Not because people are unwilling, but because modern work rewards speed, transactions, and task completion, and treats anything that looks like “slowing down for a chat” as optional.
Yet relationships are not a soft extra. They are the infrastructure of execution. Trust determines whether people raise issues early. Rapport shapes how quickly tension gets resolved. Goodwill influences whether colleagues go the extra step when it matters.
At the start of the year, people return with ambition, deadlines, and full calendars, but the relational foundations that make work flow are often still underdone.
Proximity is not the same as connection
It’s not surprising that the word parasocial made headlines recently as Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year1. It’s the term for the one-sided bonds we can form with public figures, fictional characters, and increasingly, digital entities.
That award allocation was a timely reminder that we’re surrounded by connection, content, and communication, yet many of us feel increasingly detached, overloaded, and oddly alone.
The workplace is not immune.
Leaders can be ‘in touch’ all day and still fail to create the conditions for real connection. Not because they don’t care, but because busyness crowds out the small relational moves that keep trust alive.
Your performance this year will be shaped as much by the quality of your relationships as by the quality of your strategy.
Strategy sets direction. Relationships determine traction.
Relational capital is a performance asset
In organisational research, this is often described as social capital2: the resources and advantages that come from relationships and networks shaped by both who is connected to whom and the quality of those connections, such as trust, shared norms, and reciprocity.
Social capital is the broader network asset. Relational capital is the trust and goodwill in the specific relationships you rely on most.
At work, relational capital3 is the relationship-level expression of social capital. It’s the value stored in your key working relationships, the credibility, goodwill, and trust that make it easier to get things done with your colleagues and stakeholders, especially when things are messy.
When relational capital is strong, coordination costs fall. People share information sooner, resolve tension faster and assume positive intent more often.
When it is weak, everything becomes heavier: decisions slow, misunderstandings multiply, and conflict goes underground.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety reinforces the point. Teams perform better when people feel safe to speak up, challenge, and raise concerns early, before problems calcify. Psychological safety is not ‘being nice’. It’s the product of trust, respect, and repeated micro-moments of inclusion and responsiveness.
How socially fit are you?
Most leaders don’t neglect relationships on purpose. They neglect them by default. Attention gets diluted, and everyone feels important, so no one gets intentional attention.
Consequently, it is helpful to examine your level of social fitness.
The Human Performance Resource Center4 defines social fitness as the degree to which you assess, build, and optimise your relationships and interactions with others.
Social fitness is not about being more sociable. It’s about being more intentional with the relationships that make execution smoother, decisions faster, and tension easier to resolve particularly when leaders focus on building deeper connections rather than simply expanding their networks
That’s why the next few weeks are a useful reset. You can treat them as a social fitness block: a deliberate, lightweight routine for strengthening the relationships that will help carry you through this year.
Start with a quick relationship map to focus your energy. Take time to identify and specify:
- Your core circle. Your direct team and your manager (and, depending on role, a small number of close internal stakeholders). These relationships shape daily execution and culture. They are also where trust is most easily built, or accidentally eroded.
- Your critical partners. The cross-functional allies you rely on to deliver outcomes, such as Finance, People and Culture, Technology, Risk, Legal, Operations, and Communications. Depending on your work, this group may also include key external stakeholders, suppliers, or consultants.
- Your under-tended but important relationships. People you are likely to need this year but have not invested in recently. These are often dormant ties; relationships that were once active but have gone quiet. Reconnecting can be disproportionately valuable because they bring perspective and information you cannot get from your immediate circle.
Create space for connection
To make this work, treat social fitness as something you schedule because it matters, not something you squeeze in when you have time. This is critical because good intentions won’t survive a full calendar, especially once the year accelerates.
The simplest discipline is to protect two short windows each week and use them to do the relational maintenance that keeps trust strong and relationships progressing.
Once you have protected the time, the next step is to use it well.
The goal is not a long lunch or a deep-and-meaningful with everyone you know. It is a few small, repeatable actions that build trust, reduce friction, and keep issues from going underground.
Start with three moves that are simple to do, easy to sustain, and disproportionately effective when pressure rises.
Tip One: Send gratitude notes
Gratitude is not fluff. It is a trust signal. A short note that names what someone did and why it mattered strengthens relationships because it makes the contribution visible, and it reinforces the behaviours you want more of.
Keep it simple. For example: “Thank you for X. It made a difference because of Y. And it helped the team or organisation by Z.”
Done consistently, these small messages show respect and interest. When you pair them with regular check-ins, you also strengthen reliability and reduce ambiguity, two ingredients that prevent minor friction from becoming a major tension.
Tip Two: Have a “How are we going?” conversation with key colleagues
This is one of the most underused leadership moves I see: a brief, structured check-in that focuses on the relationship, not the task list. Done well, it stops small irritations from hardening into assumptions and quiet resentment.
Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough. Use four prompts: What is working well in how we work together? What is getting in the way? What do you need more of from me? What should we stop doing now, before it becomes a bigger issue?
When you ask, “How are we going?” you send a clear signal that speaking up is welcome, not punished. Over time, that changes what gets said and what gets solved. It is psychological safety in action because you are normalising candour before something breaks in the relationship.
Tip Three: Do one act of generosity with no immediate return expected
Generosity is a credibility builder because it demonstrates that you are playing a longer game than transaction-by-transaction reciprocity.
It can be small, for example:
- An introduction that helps someone solve a problem.
- Sharing a template or insight that saves time.
- Offering cover or support during a high-pressure week.
- Publicly acknowledge someone’s contribution in a forum that matters.
The key is that it is not immediately strategic. It is relational, and that’s precisely why it works.
The benefits are clear. Relational capital creates a competitive advantage by expanding your access to information, support, and problem-solving capacity. However, if your approach is to focus on relationship-building when you have time, it simply won’t happen.
The leaders who stay the course are rarely the busiest ones. They are the ones who make early relational deposits, protect time for connection, and strengthen trust before pressure demands it. Because when the pace lifts, your relationships will either become your greatest stabiliser or your biggest stressor.
So, as we reach the final days of January, what relationship moves do you need to practise every week?
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References
- Cambridge University Press & Assessment. (2025, November 18). ‘Parasocial’ is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025. https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/parasocial-is-cambridge-dictionary-word-of-the-year-2025
- Coleman, J. S. (1988). “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology, 94(S), S95–S120.
- Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242–266.
- Human Performance Resource Center. (2020, November 16). What is social fitness? The basics of relationship health for Service Members. https://www.hprc-online.org/social-fitness/relationship-building/what-social-fitness-basics-relationship-health-service-members