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How Building Relationships Advanced My Career and Made My Job More Enjoyable
Building relationships is crucial at every step of the software engineering career ladder
Your career will be significantly better if you learn to build and leverage relationships at work. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a CTO, lead engineer or a just starting out as a junior engineer — all of them need beneficial relationships to succeed.
It doesn’t come naturally to everyone, though. I wish I’d learnt to leverage relationships earlier in my career. In this article, I’ll cover why building relationships is important, some types of relationships, and how to start building relationships.
Why Build Relationships? I’m An Engineer!
As mentioned above, it took me a long time to realise that actively building relationships was vital for my career. While I was building some relationships, I wasn’t making a conscious effort to do so, nor was I making sure to nurture any relationships.
Why was it in my interests to do so? Put simply, the more nurtured relationships you have, the easier time you’ll have at work. That goes for promotions, raises, opportunities as well as simply getting stuff done.
Furthermore, it highlighted gaps in my soft skills. When I started trying to build better relationships, I had a conversation with my line manager at the time. He gave me some crucial feedback — to look into where I was lacking in terms of soft skills. One I was already aware of — my presentation and public speaking skills were not very good. More importantly though, I’d never learnt how to listen, and I quickly came across active listening as something to learn and understand.
Once I’d started actively building relationships, the difference was night and day. I noticed a stark increase in the number of opportunities I was receiving, the recognition I was earning, and I was generally just enjoying my job more. I really enjoy helping people, so a big plus for me was more people messaging me to discuss something, or asking for some help with what they were working on (which then furthers my number of relationships).
