Recently, I had two very different reminders about relationship building, and neither involved a client.
One night, I went to trivia with a group of coworkers and somehow ended up on a team with our president and CEO. The next afternoon, I was kayaking on Lake Union with my marketing team. There was no agenda at either event. No client strategy. No business development plan. No PowerPoint. We were answering trivia questions, laughing when we were very confidently wrong, paddling around the lake, and getting to know one another outside the roles we normally occupy.
Somewhere between trivia and trying not to tip over a kayak, I found myself thinking about something I spend a lot of time talking about externally: relationships.
In business development, we understand their value almost instinctively. Who knows the client? Who has credibility with them? Who can make the introduction? Who understands what is keeping that client awake at night? Who has enough trust in the relationship to get the phone call before an opportunity ever becomes public?
We spend years cultivating those connections because we understand there is an ROI attached to them. But I am not sure we give the same level of attention to the relationships inside our own organizations.
We should.
The strength of your internal relationships affects how quickly information moves, how comfortable people are asking for help, whether difficult conversations happen early or late, how freely people share opportunities and ideas, whether teams collaborate or protect their own territory, how leaders hear what is really happening inside the organization, and ultimately how clients experience your company.
And right now, those relationships may be becoming even more important.
The organizational chart is moving
We are living through an interesting period of leadership transition.
Many Baby Boomers who have spent decades leading companies, offices, departments, and teams are retiring. What follows is rarely as simple as replacing one person with another. There is usually a cascading effect.
Someone moves into the top job. Someone else moves into theirs. A leader who once managed one office is suddenly responsible for an entire region. A department head becomes an enterprise leader. Someone who has been your peer for the past five years may now be your boss.
The boxes on the organizational chart can change overnight. Relationships do not.
Imagine someone who was your peer yesterday becoming your boss today. You already know each other. You may have spent years working side by side, sharing frustrations, solving problems, giving each other advice, and having the kind of candid conversations that happen when neither person has authority over the other. Now one person is responsible for evaluating the other.
Does the relationship suddenly become formal? Can you disagree as freely? What happens when your former peer needs to give you difficult feedback? What happens when you think they are making the wrong decision?
The new leader has an equally complicated job. Yesterday you were one of the group. Today you are leading it. You cannot pretend the old relationships do not exist, but you also cannot operate exactly as you did before.
You may be closer to some people than others. You have shared histories, inside jokes, loyalties, disagreements, and opinions about one another that were formed long before the promotion. Now everyone is watching how those relationships translate into leadership.
Are decisions fair? Are old friendships influencing opportunities? Is the new leader avoiding a difficult conversation because it feels uncomfortable to manage someone who used to be an equal? Or have they gone too far in the opposite direction and created unnecessary distance because they are trying so hard to establish authority?
None of that gets solved by a promotion announcement.
The relationship has to evolve along with the role.
The job changes when your responsibility gets bigger
There is another transition I see happening in organizations. Someone can be an exceptional leader of a team, office, business unit, or market and then be promoted into responsibility for something much larger.
On paper, it looks like the natural next step. In reality, the job may be completely different.
When you lead a smaller group, you can know a great deal about what is happening. You may have direct relationships with most of the people doing the work. You can stay involved in the details, and people know how to get to you.
Then your responsibility expands. Now there are more people, more offices, more markets, more layers, and more decisions than any one person could possibly touch. Leadership can no longer depend on your ability to personally know everything.
Your influence has to travel farther than your direct reach.
That means relationships become even more important, not less. You need leaders underneath you who trust you enough to tell you what is really happening instead of what they think you want to hear. You need peers who will challenge you. You need people several levels below you who feel safe raising a concern. You need leaders across functions who will share information instead of protecting it.
Perhaps most importantly, you have to trust other people to lead.
The skills that made someone an excellent department head may not be the same skills they need to lead an entire organization. At some point, leadership becomes less about your individual ability to execute and more about the strength of the relationships around you.
Can people disagree with you? Can a former peer tell you that you are wrong? Can someone who reports to you admit they do not know the answer? Can leaders make decisions without needing your approval every time? When you walk into a room, does the conversation continue, or does everyone suddenly start editing themselves?
Those are leadership questions, but they are also relationship questions.
Your relationship with the person you report to matters
Most of us think about our relationship with our boss primarily through the lens of performance. Am I meeting expectations? Am I delivering what they need? Do they think I am doing a good job?
Those things matter, of course. But a strong relationship with the person you report to should go deeper than a recurring one-on-one and an annual performance review.
Do they understand how you think? Do you understand what pressures they are carrying? Can you disagree without worrying that disagreement will be interpreted as disloyalty? Can you tell them something is not working before it becomes a crisis? Can you ask for help without worrying that doing so will make you appear incapable?
When those relationships are strong, work changes. There is less energy spent managing perception and more energy spent solving problems. Leaders can give people greater autonomy because they understand how those people operate. Feedback can become more direct because enough trust exists for the feedback to be useful instead of threatening.
And surprisingly small interactions can help build that trust.
Sitting beside someone at trivia is obviously not the same thing as working through a difficult business decision together. But I would argue that those seemingly insignificant moments make the difficult conversations easier later.
When you have laughed together, learned something about each other’s lives, discovered a shared interest, or watched someone passionately defend a completely incorrect trivia answer, you have added another dimension to the relationship.
You remember there is a person behind the title.
Your peers may be your most valuable internal network
I think peer relationships are among the most underestimated relationships inside an organization.
These are the people beside you trying to move work forward. They may have different responsibilities, personalities, and priorities. Sometimes you may even be competing for the same limited resources.
If the only time you interact is when one of you needs something, every interaction begins to feel transactional.
But when you have invested in the relationship beforehand, the dynamic changes. You pick up the phone instead of writing the carefully constructed email. You share information sooner. You are comfortable saying, “I need your help.” You send an opportunity their way because they are the right person for it. And perhaps just as importantly, they can tell you, “I think you are missing something,” because the relationship can withstand candor.
That becomes increasingly valuable as an organization gets larger.
No individual can possibly know everything happening across a company. You need people who know people. Someone in operations needs to know whom to call in marketing. Marketing needs to know which project leader has the right story. Business development needs to hear what the project team learned from the client. One office needs to know what another office has already figured out.
Relationships become the connective tissue.
For those of us in business development, this is especially important because sometimes the person who helps you win a client is already sitting inside your organization.
They worked with the architect ten years ago. They know the decision maker. They understand the technical challenge. They know why the last project struggled. They have the story that belongs in the interview. They may actually be the person the client needs to meet before the client can picture working with your company.
Your internal network can be every bit as valuable as your external one.
But you have to build it before you need it.
The relationship changes again when people work for you
When someone reports to you, there is another layer of responsibility.
You hold something they do not. You may influence their assignments, opportunities, visibility, compensation, and career trajectory. That makes relationship building more than a leadership preference. It becomes part of the job.
People need to know what you expect from them, but they also need to know that you know them.
What motivates them? What are they trying to learn? Where do they want to grow? What part of their job gives them energy? What are they exceptionally good at that perhaps no one is taking advantage of yet? What are they struggling with? What would make them leave?
You cannot learn all of that during a performance review once a year. You learn it through relationship.
This becomes particularly important when we talk about employee retention. Organizations often start asking difficult questions after someone turns in a resignation. What could we have done differently? What would make them stay? What opportunity were they looking for?
By then, the decision may have been forming for months.
The relationship needed to exist before the resignation letter.
When people trust their leaders, they are more likely to tell them when something is wrong. They are more comfortable admitting what they do not know. They ask for opportunities. They share ideas. They take risks. Leaders get information early enough to actually do something with it.
There is enormous ROI in that.
Succession planning is relationship planning too
All of this makes me think differently about succession planning.
Companies understandably spend a great deal of time asking, “Who is ready for the next role?” That is important, but perhaps there is another question we should be asking at the same time:
What relationships will change when they get it?
Who will suddenly report to this person? Who will become their peers? Where will they need to establish credibility? Which former peer relationships will need to be recalibrated? Who may feel passed over? Which relationships does this leader need to start building now rather than after the promotion?
And if someone is stepping into responsibility for a much broader group, who are the people throughout that organization who will help them understand what is really happening?
Succession planning cannot only be about transferring authority.
It also has to be about transferring and building trust.
That takes much longer.
Build the relationship before there is an agenda
This may be one of the simplest parts of relationship building, and one of the easiest to forget.
Not every coffee needs a purpose. Not every lunch needs to result in an introduction. Not every conversation needs a next step. You do not need to walk away from every interaction asking, “What did I get out of that?”
In fact, some of the strongest relationships are built precisely because there was no immediate payback expected.
Have coffee with someone because you are curious about them. Eat lunch with people outside your immediate team. Ask a colleague how they ended up doing what they do. Sit next to someone you normally would not talk to at the next company event. Celebrate somebody’s win even when it has nothing to do with you. Make an introduction because it will help them, not because you expect one in return.
And sometimes, simply check in.
The moment people realize you only reach out when you need something, the relationship starts to feel transactional. But when you have invested time without an ask attached, trust has room to grow.
Then, when the hard conversation comes, when the big opportunity appears, when you need help, or when the organization changes around you, you are not starting from zero.
There is already trust in the bank.
That does not mean we build relationships so we can eventually cash them in. That misses the point.
The goal is not to build a bigger internal network so you can extract value from it later.
The goal is to build genuine relationships.
The value tends to follow.
Your clients eventually feel all of this
Here is where internal relationship building connects directly back to business development.
Your clients do not experience your organizational chart. They experience your people.
They notice when your team communicates well. They notice when somebody was clearly brought into the conversation five minutes before the meeting. They notice when one department does not know what another promised. They notice when people interrupt each other. They notice whether your interview team genuinely trusts one another, and they absolutely notice when they do not.
We sometimes spend enormous amounts of time trying to manufacture chemistry before an important client interview.
But chemistry is difficult to manufacture.
It is much easier when the relationship already exists.
The superintendent and project executive who already trust one another communicate differently. The architect and contractor who have built a relationship before the pursuit solve problems differently. The marketing professional who really knows the operations leader can draw out a better story. The senior executive who has invested time with the next generation can confidently bring them into the client relationship instead of keeping every relationship at the top.
The client may not be able to articulate exactly what they are seeing. They just know they can picture themselves working with this team.
That is when internal relationship building becomes external business development.
You do not need another meeting to do this
I do not think the solution is putting “build stronger internal relationships” on everyone’s annual goals and scheduling another mandatory networking event.
People know when connection is being manufactured.
It can be much simpler.
Have lunch with the person you normally only email. Stay a little longer after a meeting because the conversation became interesting. Ask someone what they are working on that excites them. Take the coffee meeting with no agenda. Go to trivia. Get in the kayak.
Those moments can seem insignificant because there is no immediate transaction attached to them. No opportunity moves to the next stage. No proposal gets submitted. No revenue suddenly appears on the dashboard.
But relationship building has always worked that way.
You rarely know which conversation will become valuable later.
The coworker you laugh with today may be the person you need beside you during a difficult pursuit six months from now. The peer you invest in today may become your boss. The emerging leader working for you today may someday lead the company. The colleague in another office may know exactly the person your client needs to meet.
And sometimes there is no dramatic business outcome at all.
Sometimes you simply create a workplace where people know one another, trust one another, and enjoy doing hard things together.
There is tremendous value in that too.
Maybe the real test of our internal relationships comes when something changes. A retirement. A promotion. A reorganization. A difficult project. A bad quarter. A new leader.
That is when you find out whether you have built a collection of coworkers or a network of trust.
We understand that clients choose people they know and trust. Maybe we should apply that same level of intention to the people inside our own companies.
Because the better connected we are internally, the better we can show up externally.
That is relationship to ROI too.
And sometimes it starts in a client strategy meeting. Sometimes it starts over coffee. And sometimes it starts arguing over a trivia answer one night and trying not to tip over a kayak the next afternoon.
They all count.
I would love to hear how you are seeing this play out inside your own organization. Have leadership transitions changed relationships between former peers? Have you had to navigate becoming the boss of someone who was once your equal, or having a former peer become yours? And where could stronger internal relationships change the way your organization works?
If this resonated, please share it. Maybe even the person you have been meaning to get coffee with.
