Aligned

Chapter 3

Rapport

You don’t need to be good at politics to just be a genuine person

Now that you understand your key stakeholders better, it’s time to create strong working relationships with them. You don’t have to become best friends with everyone you work with, but it’s surprising how much easier it is to handle a disagreement over a casual cup of coffee.

As Irie realizes that she needs to put more effort into her work relationships, we’ll explore the topic of building rapport, and you’ll learn about what’s most important:

• Be relatable, connecting with other people at a human level and exploiting a natural human bias we have toward people similar to ourselves.
• Build mutual respect by assuming positive intent, accepting people’s differences, and acting with curiosity instead of becoming defensive.
• Practice empathy by validating and sharing in someone’s emotional experience.
• Encourage vulnerability—not by oversharing—but by talking about what’s really going on, being willing to take on risk, and accepting the possibility of failure.

The approaches in this chapter may at first seem highly transactional, which they can be if you treat them as such. The real magic comes when you get to know people, not because you have to but because you want to. Building rapport needs to come from a place of honesty, or your actions may appear shallow or manipulative.

You will also need patience when building rapport. With some people, you may make connections very quickly, but with others ...