Chris A. Petersen

Strategic Thinker, Professional Speaker, and Workshop Facilitator

How to be Kind and Strong

Kindness and strength are vital in all aspects of life. You want to be kind to your family and friends, your coworkers and your clients. You also want to be strong for yourself, reach out of your comfort zone and be courageous in all of your endeavors; sometimes that is easier said than done.

When you’re bogged down by work, typically the last thing you want to do is be kind and offer strength to others; you just want to get through the day and go home. I get it, we all feel that way sometimes.

But, you have to do it anyway. Being kind to your coworkers makes the workplace more enjoyable in the long run, and being kind to your clients preserves relationships and sustains future partnership. Clients remember who was nice to them and who was not, and that’s a huge factor in if they choose to be repeat clients.

You also have to remain strong, which takes on many differents forms. Pushing through tough days and going even when you don’t want to is being strong. Being strong in your convictions and sticking to what you believe in is another. Don’t compromise your moral compass, as there will be times in your career when this will be tested. Also, remain strong and confident in your abilities and be willing to branch out and try new things. This will help you expand and continue growing in your profession.

Here are a couple ways I remember to stay kind and strong each and every day. I hope they can help you too.

Put Yourself in Their Position

It can be easy to get frustrated working with other people. We all have our own thoughts and ideas, and it can be hard to compromise with someone else when you have a strong belief in your vision. Instead of lashing out when they don’t agree or see your perspective, think about how you are feeling.

You want to do your best and put forth the highest quality product/presentation/project as possible. Well, so do they—this is their job and they have their own vision of how to achieve the best results.

When you can empathize and realize you both are working towards the same goal, it makes it easier to be kind to them.
This can also branch out into other scenarios such as a difficult client—they just want to buy the best product for their own professional or personal reasons. No one is trying to argue with you or ruin what you are doing. Everyone wants the situation to turn out right.

Know Your Convictions

Stay true to what you believe in. If an employer or client is trying to convince you to do something professionally or personally that you are not comfortable with, be strong enough to say no. You will feel better in the end, even if it costs you a client, though it probably wasn’t a client you want to work with anyways.

Include People

Everyone wants to be included. Invite the new coworker to lunch, explain what’s going on in the office lately, and keep everyone in the loop. I don’t mean gossip about other employees, but keeping others professionally informed on the projects going on.

Stand By Your Work

Take the blame when you mess up. It takes a strong person to not push the blame on to someone else, so own up to it, and then right the wrong. Employers don’t expect you to be perfect, but they expect you to put out good work and try your best.

In general, be yourself and stand by what you do. Be kind to others, and try your best to put forth good work, and you and your coworkers will all enjoy the workplace more.

How to Develop Good Relationships with Coworkers

Oftentimes people in the workplace hear opposing opinions on the role of friendship and its place in the work environment. One side says, “We’re not at work to make friends.” These companies look at the potential downfalls of incorporating friendship into the business plan–such as excessive chatter, romantic entanglements, problems for people who struggle with separating work from play, creating conflict-of-interest scenarios, and challenging independent judgment.

While these are valid risks of encouraging positive relationships in the workplace, this mindset is is focused on making work the transactional center of efficient people tackling a list of tasks. However, research proves allowing and promoting team-building is more beneficial in the long run for employees.

In the past, companies who sat on the “no friends” side of the fence restricted opportunities for their employees to build relationships. Oftentimes this took the form of discouraging employees from participating on the same sports team, romantic relationships, and in extreme cases even discouraging eating together on lunch breaks.   

Companies that sit on the other side of the fence (and in this day and age, most companies are pro-friendship) stress the need for healthy work relationships, placing value in team-building exercises in order to foster friendship in the workplace. People can make or break the work environment, and how they relate to one another is critical. Friendships at work can produce extremely desirable things:

  1. Increased and steady productivity
  2. Steady levels of happiness and enjoyment
  3. And finally, providing stable mental environments

It’s important to have healthy relationships with your coworkers in the office. It provides avenues for workers to problem solve and tackle projects together; instead of feeling like an obligation, camaraderie and relationship building creates a situation of a friend needing assistance to finish a big project.

On average, the full-time employee spends eight hours a day at work. The critical variable: is the work environment draining and detrimental to productivity, or are there people to offer jokes, light-hearted stories, and a shoulder to lean on during times of large workloads, resulting in a welcoming space to work? Introducing opportunities for employees to forge work friendships not only allows a time to de-stress, but also a time to laugh.

Which ties into the final point – staying sane. When the deluge of hectic craziness hits, sometimes only a shared groan can remind you that you’re human. Making friends in the workplace creates a support network and does wonders for morale, mental health, and productivity.

Regardless of where you work, more often than not you will have to interact with people; you will have a boss, you will have people you’re serving, and you will have people you’re working with. Developing and maintaining good relationships with coworkers is important.

Let’s look at ways to cultivate and develop good relationships with coworkers:

Know how to present yourself

Putting your best foot forward is always intimidating when beginning a new job or beginning a new friendship. Being personable and confident in the skills you have, as well as who you are, allows you to interact with coworkers about tasks and assignments, providing avenues to break the ice. While it may take time to learn how to perform the responsibilities of the position you’ve been hired for, it’s also important to learn how to integrate yourself into the company.

Use good communication skills

Communication takes work – and is learned through a trial-and-error process. Listening, asking questions, being honest, being open, and being prepared and confident in what you’re trying to say are all important pieces of being a good communicator. Getting personal allows you to build a connection by focusing on how a message is being understood by the listener. Ensuring that the information you’re passing on in a conversation is correct is critical. If you lack confidence in whether or not your information is valid, admit uncertainty. When speaking with another person, avoid superfluous and vague words and phrases that would detract from what you’re saying. Most importantly, effective communication is knowing what, when, and how to communicate with those around you. By being a good communicator, people can get to know you on a deeper and more personal level, resulting in friendship.

Establish appropriate boundaries

Remember, building relationships with coworkers is so that the workload goes faster and getting through it becomes more efficient. If, instead, you use the workplace to pick up a romantic relationship, it will complicate not only how you relate to the individual you’re now seeing, but the dynamic between you and the other workers. Keeping in mind that the workplace is the environment to develop strategies to work better, instead of a place to find new drinking buddies is helpful for drawing those lines.

Learning how to separate professional and personal relationships

In some cases, you may be privy to more knowledge about a situation than your coworker friend, and you’ll be faced with the choice of either sharing what you know even though it’s detrimental for the information to be shared, or keeping the information from your friend but dealing with feelings of betrayal. Or you may be in a scenario where you and your friend are competing and being ranked against each other. A necessary skill is learning how to celebrate your friend’s success when they do better than you, and how to maintain friendship through jealousy which may result from doing better than your friends.