5 Relationship Skills Necessary to Make Your Relationship Last

relationship skills

Key takeaways

  • Relationship skills are the tactical qualities that you practice which make a relationship successful.
  • Some of the key skills you will need to make a relationship successful include open communication, kindness, respect, openness, and honesty.
  • Your weak times are equally if not more important than your strong ties. Therefore, be sure to invest in those relationships by practicing your relationship skills with them.

What are relationship skills?

via GIPHY

Relationship skills are the qualities that make your relationships successful. Relationship skills are not innate- you have to learn them in order for them to work well with others, but it’s important to do so because without these relationship skills your chances of success decrease exponentially!

Relationships are important, and they’re also difficult to maintain sometimes. Relationship skills can be hard to come by, but luckily there is some scientific research that has studied what relationship skills work best in maintaining healthy relationships. These 5 relationship skills will make your relationships last longer!

The 5 key relationship skills to have

The five key relationship skills to cultivate and grow are open communication, kindness, respect, openness, and honesty. Growing these skills can help you elevate your relationships, both personally and professionally. Many of these skills feed into one another. For example, respect is necessary for achieving open communication. Below, we dive into each skill, discuss its importance, and provide tips on how to practice these skills in your relationship.

1. Open Communication

The most important skill for any type of relationship is communication. It’s the key to understanding each other’s needs and wants. Without this, a healthy relationship cannot exist.

In business, open communication can lead to more productive ways of working by having individuals be able to provide open and honest feedback. Kim Scott, ex-Googler, is well known for coining the concept of radical candor. Her concept, which focuses on grooming leaders to care personally for their team members while challenging directly, is known as an effective tool for providing feedback and is a form of open communication.

Open communication takes deliberate time to build. Additionally, being able to have open communication requires psychological safety among your team members. Take the time to build trust and make your work environment a safe space by showing your team members that you care about them and their well-being.

2. Kindness

Relationship researcher John Gottman found that one of the best predictors of a successful relationship was how often each person showed kindness towards their significant other (Gottman & Silver, 1999). With that in mind, it isn’t a far jump to apply a similar approach to your professional relationships.

Compassionate people tend to have happier relationships than those who lack kindness. This makes sense because kindness comes naturally when you’re caring about someone else’s happiness too! Exercising kindness can help promote feelings of trust and security; your peers may feel more comfortable opening up about a mistake they made without you overreacting. This, in turn, helps promote open communication.

3. Respect

Respect has been shown to be an essential relationship skill. Being able to demonstrate respect for other individuals sets a foundation for other relationship skills, such as open communication. This is because regardless of what you are saying, the other individual recognizes that you acknowledge and care about them as an individual.

Having a respectful workplace is important because it fosters a community of trust. This can lead to better debates, discussions, and ideas, which can lead to better overall outcomes. Different ways you can demonstrate respect include acknowledging people’s feelings, exercising your manners, and being kind when someone makes a mistake. Practicing these will signal to an individual that you are taking the time to pay them the respect you would hope for.

4. Openness

Openness is the ability to hear out the other person and their perspectives, even if you may not agree with them. In some ways, openness is a skill that goes hand-in-hand with kindness. And that’s because openness requires one to react to those around them in a calm manner. This is an important relationship skill because it helps you actively hear the other individual out. You may even opt to be empathetic to their cause, which can help you develop a better understanding of their perspective.

5. Honesty

Finally, honesty is huge in maintaining healthy relationships with your partner, friends, and colleagues. There are many places in business where you may feel pressured into being dishonest or stretching the truth. However, many times your team members, clients, and superiors would rather you be honest.

Dishonesty typically leads to having to juggle a bunch of storylines, which is emotionally draining and exhausting. It becomes even more important at work as dishonesty can lead to severe punishment, like being fired from your job.

Take our DISC personality assessment here to learn more about your personality and how to interact with different personality types!

Weak ties and relationship skills

Research reported by various articles demonstrates that your weak ties may be more important than your strong ties, especially when it comes to your professional network. A weak tie doesn’t mean you should not take the time to exercise your strong relationship skills with these individuals. Instead, making sure you exercise these skills with your weak ties becomes even more important. Weak ties are valuable for making introductions to companies or a referral to a job posting. Practicing strong relationship skills can help avoid the sense of opportunism when you reach out.

Investing in your weak ties is equally as important. Be sure to connect with individuals every so often. Schedule coffee chats on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to help you maintain your relationship. Another way to stay in touch is to share with your colleagues any news, articles, and or podcasts you think they will be interested in. Sharing such mediums can help you discover where are common interests and also spark conversation.

Recommended Resources:
 

Uncover your strengths and weaknesses with our complimentary assessment. Boost your effectiveness at work and with your team.

Free Resource Library: Access our extensive collection of valuable resources for instant support in your personal and professional growth.

Explore Our Course Library:

Enhance your leadership skills with our diverse selection of courses. Take your abilities to the next level and become a more effective leader and team player.

Testimonials

Our Clients Love the Professional Leadership Institute

Your team will, too! Check out some reviews from our students.
The PLI program was invaluable to our network.
The range of topics delivered, the open dialogue, experience, and examples that PLI brought to each session were outstanding and provided a path for our Franchisees and Managers to look at leadership, coaching, and connecting with their teams in a new light. Many have implemented these strategies in their bakeries and have seen immediate results.
Michelle C.
COBS Bread
Highly recommend to help your team move forward
We have locations around BC and Alberta, so getting people on the same page can be very difficult... Until now. Our entire management team and location managers take the same great courses and then meet monthly online with our coach to apply it to our situation. People are engaged, the courses are excellent, we love our coach, and we are all learning together!
Jason Fawcett
President, Kelson Group
The result has been a transformation of our culture. 
We decided to implement PLI's strategies across the country in over 150 locations and over 3500 employees.  The result has been a transformation of our culture.  People's lives have been positively impacted - professionally and personally.  Morale is high and sales and profits are up as a result.
Daryl Verbeek
Daryl Verbeek
We’ve learned how to fix ongoing personnel issues once and for all
The roadmap laid out set our business up to quintuple in sales.  We've learned how to fix ongoing personnel issues once and for all, attract top talent, and spend our time focused on results, not internal staffing problems.  I highly recommend PLI to you - it's worked for us!
John DeJong
Satisfied Client
I had no idea that running a business could be this fun!
In less than 18 months of working with Trevor, he has transformed my business from being average to exceptional, where mediocrity is not acceptable, where being great is standard.  Working with PLI has allowed me to realize my dream of not simply owning a job, but owning a business.
Justin Bontkes
Principal, Caliber Projects
Our culture has taken major steps forward this year
Our culture has taken major steps forward this year with Trevor’s help.  He is funny, relatable, and his tools are very very practical and have helped us focus and upgrade our teams throughout our retail network. Trevor recently spoke to an employee group, and one person remarked, “I could listen to Trevor all day.”   We would highly recommend Trevor.
Stan Pridham
Founder, KMS Tools
The results have been remarkable
At first, we resisted, “This just won’t work with a law firm.” But we persisted and the results have been remarkable: our client base and profits have steadily improved, and staff engagement and morale is the healthiest its ever been.
Doug Lester
Partner, RDM Lawyers
Helped our fast-growing business become what it is today
I've experienced PLI's approach first hand and it's been crucial to sustaining our growth.  I can't imagine a business that wouldn't benefit greatly from his help.
Brian Antenbring
Founder, TEEMA
Provided practical ways to make positive changes
Trevor was incredibly well-received by the entire organization. He was able to articulate people issues that many of our franchisees were experiencing and provided them with practical ways to make positive changes. We have implemented the Star Chart tool across the organization and see it as vital to building happy, effective teams.
Aaron Gillespie
President, COBS Bread
Scroll to Top

Start Learning Today

For Individuals

Unlock your potential and accelerate your career with sought-after management and leadership skills.

 

Transform Your Organization

For Teams

Book a consultation to discuss your challenges and discover how we can help you build a winning team.

 

Sign Up For Weekly Tips!

Get Weekly Coaching Tips Straight To Your Inbox Every Monday.