Today you’re going to learn how to build better business relationships.
You can have 2,000 LinkedIn connections and still not know a single person who’d pick up the phone if your project went sideways on a Friday afternoon. That gap is what this article is about.
Business relationships are odd things. Nobody hands you a manual, yet almost everything at work runs through them: the client who renews without haggling, the colleague who flags a problem before it becomes your problem, the former boss who mentions your name in a room you’re not in. Some people seem to collect these relationships without trying. Most of us have to build them on purpose.
The good news is that a lot of what works is small. It’s also more measurable than you’d think, because researchers have spent years testing what actually makes people trust, like and remember each other at work. Below are 13 habits backed by that research, each with something concrete you can do this week. If you want to sharpen the basics first, it’s worth brushing up on your social skills in general, but you can start anywhere on this list.
1. Keep the small promises, not just the big ones
“I’ll send that over this afternoon.” “Let me check and get back to you.” We say these lines on autopilot. Then the afternoon fills up.
Those throwaway commitments matter more than they feel. Zenger Folkman, a leadership consultancy, analyzed 1.8 million assessments of more than 162,000 leaders, each rated by an average of 13 colleagues, and published the results in July 2025. Leaders seen as needing improvement at keeping commitments sat in the 13th percentile for overall leadership effectiveness. Those rated as having a profound strength in it reached the 74th. The firm also matched the ratings to engagement scores from roughly 573,000 direct reports, and engagement was far higher under leaders who followed through. Keep in mind that this is proprietary 360-degree data, not a peer-reviewed study, and it shows an association rather than proof that promise-keeping alone drives the results.
The mechanism isn’t mysterious, though. Every kept promise is a small piece of evidence that your words predict your actions. Stack up enough of that evidence and people stop double-checking you, which is more or less what trust is. Break small promises often and the reverse happens: people build in buffers, chase you for updates and quietly route work around you. If this is a weak spot, here’s a practical guide on how to keep a promise.
Start small: for one week, write down every “I’ll get back to you” you say, and close each one, or renegotiate it, before the deadline passes.
2. Ask the second question
Most people ask one question and then wait for their turn to talk. The second question is where relationships start.
Karen Huang and colleagues at Harvard tested this in live conversations, online and in speed dating, and published the work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017. People who asked more questions were liked more by their conversation partners, and follow-up questions did most of the work. The reason is responsiveness. A follow-up proves you were listening, and the researchers found that this sense of being understood and cared for explained the extra liking. Oddly, participants didn’t predict the effect at all, which may be why so few of us bother. The study is nearly a decade old and partly rests on one speed-dating sample, but I found nothing newer that contradicts it.
Picture this (a hypothetical): a client mentions over coffee that their team has just moved to a new office. “Oh, nice” ends the thread. “How’s the team taking it?” opens a door, and you might learn the move was a cost cut, which tells you something useful about their budget next quarter.
Next time, do this: in your next meeting with someone outside your team, ask at least two follow-up questions before you say anything about yourself. For more on keeping conversations going, see these ideas on how to have a good conversation with anyone.
3. Listen as if you’ll be tested on it
Good questions only help if you actually hear the answers.
Guy Itzchakov, an associate professor and department chair at the University of Haifa who runs a lab on interpersonal listening, describes high-quality listening as three things working together: focused attention, accurate understanding and a non-judgmental intention toward the speaker. The summary of his November 2025 talk for the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations lays out what his research has found. Employees who feel genuinely heard report higher job satisfaction and performance and less burnout, and being listened to makes people less defensive. That last point matters a lot in business. A defensive client won’t tell you what’s really wrong.
His earlier review with Avraham Kluger, published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior in 2022, drew on 144 studies and found consistent links between feeling listened to and better relationship quality and job performance. Most of that evidence is correlational, and the review noted that only one experiment at the time had shown listening directly raising trust. The pattern is still hard to ignore.
The practical enemy is divided attention, which is something you can fix today. If you want to work on the empathy side too, read about becoming a more understanding person. In your next important call, close the laptop, turn the phone face down, and before you reply, sum up what the other person said in one sentence so they can correct you.
4. Make your thanks specific
“Thanks!” at the bottom of an email is fine. It’s also forgettable.
A study published in the Journal of Management in November 2025 by Sean Sheridan, Dejun “Tony” Kong and colleagues looked at how supervisors express gratitude and how employees take it. When the way a supervisor said thanks matched what the employee actually valued, people felt more appreciated and spoke up more at work. When it didn’t match, felt appreciation dropped. Kong summed up the takeaway in a University of Colorado article on the research: thanks works best when it’s thoughtful and specific, and the form matters, whether that’s a handwritten note, a coffee break or quietly taking something off someone’s plate. The study focused on supervisors and their teams, so applying it to clients or peers is a sensible extension rather than a tested result.
It sits comfortably next to older work. In experiments published in Psychological Science in 2018, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people writing thank-you letters underestimated how happy the recipients would feel and overestimated how awkward the letters would seem.
Your move: pick one person who helped you this month and tell them exactly what they did and what difference it made. A short paragraph is plenty. Being this specific is a big part of emotional intelligence, and people notice it.
5. Give before you ask, and mean it
You’ve probably heard “give first” as networking advice. It works, though not quite for the reason people assume.
The chain goes like this. Reciprocity is one of the oldest social norms we have: when someone helps us, we feel a pull to return the favor. So far, so obvious. The catch is that the pull depends on how we read the favor. Peter Belmi and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford ran five experiments, published in 2015, showing that people felt less obligated to repay favors in a work context than in a personal one. Part of the reason was that they doubted the favor-doer’s motives, and part was that they started calculating how useful that person might be later. So a favor that looks like a transaction gets treated like one, while a favor that looks genuine triggers the real norm.
Does any of this show up in actual businesses? Abigail Barr and Pieter Serneels, writing in Experimental Economics in March 2025, combined behavioral experiments with worker surveys and found a strong positive link between how much workers reciprocated and how productive their firms were. It’s correlational, and the authors found that their first estimate overstated the effect once they accounted for feedback running the other way, but it fits the idea that cooperative habits have real value.
So the order matters: help first, don’t keep score out loud, and ask later for something unrelated. This week, send one person an article, an introduction or a contact that’s useful to them, and don’t attach a request.
6. Treat customer relationships as fragile, because they are
Customer relationships run on the same rules, just with less patience.
The 7th edition of Salesforce’s State of the AI Connected Customer research, a YouGov survey of 15,015 consumers in 18 countries carried out in July and August 2024 and published that October, is the latest edition I could find. Its picture is blunt:
| Finding (consumers, 2024 survey) | Share |
|---|---|
| Trust companies less than they did a year ago | 72% |
| Feel companies are reckless with customer data | 65% |
| Expect consistent interactions across departments | 69% |
| Say poor service would stop them buying again | 43% |
The consistency figure is the one most teams overlook. Customers don’t experience your org chart. They experience one company, and when sales promises one thing and support says another, trust leaks away even if every individual was polite. It’s a vendor-run survey, and Salesforce sells software aimed at these exact problems, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than a precise reading.
When a customer is already upset, how you handle the next ten minutes matters more than the original mistake, and these strategies for dealing with angry people are useful there. A quick experiment: ask one long-standing customer what the most annoying part of working with you is, fix it, and tell them you did.
7. Meet in person on purpose, not by default
Hybrid and remote work killed the casual hallway chat for a lot of teams. One company tried to replace it deliberately, and measured what happened.
Atlassian, the software company behind Jira and Trello, went fully distributed in 2020. From August 2022 it ran more than 1,600 in-person team gatherings lasting three to five days, with an average of 16 people each, and its internal Team Anywhere Lab surveyed participants the month before and after. Sense of team connection rose by an average of 27%. New graduates gained the most: 96% said they felt connected to their team in the month after a gathering, up from 74% in the month before. Then the effect faded, with scores back near baseline after about four months, so Atlassian settled on bringing teams together roughly three times a year. These figures come from the company’s own blog, written by Dr. Molly Sands and published in February 2024, not from a peer-reviewed paper, and there was no control group, so read them as a well-documented case rather than proof.
Think of it like charging a battery. One good charge keeps you going for a while, then you need another. The comparison breaks down in one useful place: a battery charges the same no matter what you do with it plugged in, whereas Atlassian’s managers were told to use the time for relationship-building and important work, not routine meetings that could happen on video.
Test it this week: look at the next quarter and find one client or colleague you’ve only ever seen on a screen. Set up a coffee, a site visit or a lunch, and leave room for unstructured talk. If small talk makes you freeze, these tips on getting good at small talk will help.
8. Reconnect with people you’ve drifted away from
There’s probably a name in your head right now. A former colleague, an old client, someone you meant to message months ago and didn’t, because it started to feel weird.
Send it anyway. Peggy Liu of the University of Pittsburgh and her colleagues ran 13 experiments with more than 5,900 participants, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2022. Again and again, the people reaching out underestimated how much the recipient appreciated hearing from them. The more surprising the message, the bigger the appreciation, and the underestimate was larger for weaker ties than for close ones. Senders worry about awkwardness. Recipients mostly feel the pleasant surprise of being remembered. One limit worth knowing: the studies covered people who had simply lost touch, not relationships that ended in a falling-out.
Say you’re a freelance designer (again, hypothetical) who hasn’t spoken to a former agency contact in two years. A two-line note saying you saw their new campaign and liked the typography takes three minutes. The worst realistic outcome is a polite reply. The likely one is a warmer contact than you expected. Being friendly and kind by default makes this much easier.
Here’s a simple way in: pick three people you’ve lost touch with and send each a short message today, with no ask attached.
9. Look after your manager, too
We put a lot of energy into clients and peers and forget the relationship upward. Right now, that’s a mistake.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published in April 2026 with data collected from January to December 2025, shows managers under real strain. Only 22% of managers were engaged. Some 45% of managers reported a lot of stress the previous day, against 39% of individual contributors, and they were slightly lonelier too, at 23% versus 21%. Help Net Security’s coverage of the report notes that manager engagement fell five points between 2024 and 2025. Overall global engagement slipped to 20%, the lowest since 2020. These are survey snapshots, so they tell you how managers feel, not why any particular manager is struggling.
The practical point is simple. A stressed manager has less bandwidth to notice your work, defend your projects or mentor you. Making their job easier with clear updates, no surprises and problems that arrive with a suggested fix builds the kind of trust that pays off at review time. It also helps to ask for input in a form they can actually answer quickly, and these tips on how to ask your manager for feedback are a good starting point.
Give it a go: at your next one-to-one, ask your manager what’s taking up most of their headspace this month, and whether there’s one thing you could take off their plate.
10. Have at least one real friend at work
Some people treat work friendships as a nice extra. Global health bodies now treat social connection as a health issue.
In June 2025 the WHO Commission on Social Connection published its flagship report, From loneliness to social connection. It estimated that 1 in 6 people worldwide are affected by loneliness and linked loneliness to about 871,000 deaths a year, roughly 100 every hour. The commission argued that social connection should be built into policy across several areas, employment among them, and the report followed the World Health Assembly’s first resolution on social connection, adopted in May 2025. The mortality figure is an estimate modeled from observational research, so it describes risk, not a precise count.
Work is where most adults spend a big share of their waking hours, so it’s an obvious place to build connection, and where you work seems to matter. In Gallup’s 2026 data, 24% of fully remote and hybrid workers reported a lot of loneliness the previous day, compared with 18% of remote-capable employees who worked on-site.
A work friend isn’t the same as a contact. It’s the person you can be honest with on a bad day and who’ll be honest back. Team-building exercises rarely get you there. Noticing when someone is struggling and showing empathy in a way that feels real does, and so does showing up again the following week. This week, invite one colleague you like to lunch with no agenda at all.
11. Keep your weak ties warm
Your closest colleagues know what you know. That’s the problem.
In 2022 Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral published a study in Science that tested the old “strength of weak ties” theory with experimental data. Between 2015 and 2019, LinkedIn randomly varied its connection recommendations for more than 20 million users, a period that produced about 2 billion new ties and 600,000 new jobs. Moderately weak ties, acquaintances who share some mutual connections but not many, did the most for job mobility, while the strongest ties did the least. The effect was clearest in digital industries. In less digital sectors, strong ties mattered more.
It’s one of the few relationship studies with a genuinely causal design, but it measures job moves, not deal flow or relationship quality. The logic carries over, though: weak ties bring news you wouldn’t otherwise hear, like a client changing suppliers, a team about to hire or a company looking for a partner.
Start small: once a month, have a 20-minute conversation with someone from another department, an industry group or your alumni network who isn’t already in your inner circle.
12. Disagree openly, and make it safe to disagree with you
Strong business relationships aren’t the ones with no friction. They’re the ones that survive it.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor whose research made psychological safety a mainstream idea, is blunt on this point. Speaking at the Workhuman Live Forum in London in March 2025, she said, “Psychological safety is not being nice.” In a 2024 Stanford Graduate School of Business podcast, she described it as believing you can admit a mistake, ask for help or openly disagree without being punished, and she argued that anyone who wants candor has to seek it out and show gratitude when they get it. In a November 2025 interview with UNLEASH she added that a lack of candor holds teams back from learning, and that candor and efficiency can go together.
Relationships where nobody ever pushes back slowly turn into polite theatre. The client who never challenges your proposal may simply be shopping elsewhere. Disagreeing well means going after the idea rather than the person and staying open to being wrong, and learning to be tolerant of other people’s opinions is the other half of that skill.
The next time someone disagrees with you in a meeting, thank them before you respond, then ask what they would do instead.
13. Build trust across differences
The easiest relationships to build are with people just like you. They’re also the least likely to teach you anything.
That’s getting harder, not easier. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, based on online interviews with nearly 34,000 people in 28 countries in late 2025 and released in January 2026, found that 7 in 10 respondents were unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, backgrounds or information sources. At work, 42% of employees said they’d rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values. There’s an encouraging side, too. “My employer” was the most trusted institution, at 78% among employees, and Edelman named coworkers and direct supervisors among the people who can help bridge those divides.
So you’re better placed than you might think. You already work with colleagues, clients and partners who see the world differently. The work is treating that difference as information rather than a threat: asking how someone reached their view, and looking for the goal you share. These ideas on seeing things from different points of view are a good place to practise.
Your move: this month, have one curious conversation with a colleague whose background or opinions differ noticeably from yours, and aim to understand them, not to convince them.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll miss a deadline, forget a follow-up, snap at a colleague or drop a client’s request. Everyone does. What counts is the repair.
Research on trust repair is surprisingly specific here. In two experiments published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2004, Peter Kim, Donald Ferrin, Cecily Cooper and Kurt Dirks found that apologizing repaired trust better than denying when the problem was one of competence, such as a mistake or a skills gap. Integrity problems were harder to fix, and when there was later evidence that the person really was at fault, an apology still worked better than a denial. Later work by Dirks and the same colleagues, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2011, found that apologies, penance and new safeguards all repaired trust through the same route: whether the other person believed you genuinely regretted the lapse. Both are controlled studies using scenarios rather than long-term workplace data, and the 2004 paper is old, but later research has kept building on it.
In plain terms:
- If you got something wrong, say so quickly and specifically. “Mistakes were made” doesn’t count.
- Show what you’ll do differently, then do it where people can see it. Words start the repair, changed behavior finishes it.
- Don’t wait for a perfect moment. Zenger Folkman’s advice to leaders is to flag slipping commitments early and reset expectations, because going quiet does more damage.
Go easy on yourself as well. One bad week doesn’t cancel months of reliable work. If the slip happened on a day that was already going badly, these steps for turning a bad day around can stop it spiralling.
Conclusion
Better business relationships rarely come from one big gesture. They come from keeping small promises, asking the second question, saying thanks like you mean it and showing up in person when it counts. None of it is complicated. The hard part is still doing it after the first try.
Pick one habit from this list, ideally the one that made you wince a little, and work on it for the next two weeks. Then add another. For more practical ideas on working with clients, colleagues and partners, browse the Business section on Perfect 24 Hours.
