An Excerpt from Managing Up
To cultivate a lasting professional relationship, focus on how you can help the other person, writes executive coach Melody Wilding.
Establishing effective communication with your boss or colleagues at work can often feel like a careful balancing act, navigating emotions and different communication styles. In her new book, Managing Up, human behavior professor and executive coach Melody Wilding provides a guide to help readers advocate for their needs, strengthen workplace relationships, and operate from a position of confidence, regardless of their level in the workplace hierarchy.
In this excerpt, Wilding emphasizes an often-overlooked aspect of networking: the importance of regularly investing in the relationship after an initial meeting to build a lasting and fruitful connection.
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Build Rapport by Being of Service
The best way to reinvest in any networking relationship is to provide value, even in the smallest of ways. What may seem like an unimportant gesture or inconsequential piece of information to you could be very meaningful to your contacts regardless of whether they are more or less experienced, powerful, or established than you.
Consider one or more of these “micro-gives”:
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Share a resource. Through a vegan group at her company, Giada discovered that one of her boss’s peers (with whom she had had little to no interaction thus far) had recently started composting their vegetable scraps. When Giada came across an interesting composting tool she was considering trying herself, she took a chance and forwarded it to her boss’s peer, who replied, “Cool—thanks!” It didn’t seem significant at first, but in every meeting afterward, the leader made a point to personally greet Giada and ask about how she was doing, which gave her a chance to have the visibility conversation (chapter 7).
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Offer an invite. Organize an internal roundtable or panel discussion featuring a topic your executives care about. Once a quarter, request recommendations for insightful industry news or trends that you send out or post to social media as a roundup, tagging those who contributed. Set up a happy hour for peers across the company.
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Become a bridge builder. Look for mutually beneficial connections and introductions you can make. Always do a double opt-in introduction. Reach out to each person separately, with some context as to why you think they would benefit from knowing each other, such as shared interests, potential business opportunities, or relevant skills and experiences. If both parties agree, put them in touch via email, text, etc.
- Surprise and delight. When we’re surprised, positive emotions like gratitude and connection intensify up to 400 percent. Perhaps you put extra polish on a joint presentation by adding graphics, charts, and other forms of data visualization without being asked. If someone asks you for feedback on something, send a video recording of your input rather than just leaving comments in a doc. If you come across a book your colleague or a leader might enjoy, mail a copy to their office, along with a handwritten note.
When you offer assistance, you activate the “helper’s high,” sparking “feel good” neurotransmitters like dopamine. Even when people don’t remember the specifics of what you did or said, they always remember how you made them feel. Being of service also triggers reciprocity, an innate human desire to want to return favors and balance scales. This isn’t transactional or manipulative (especially if you act with kindness and genuine interest in someone else); it’s just how social relationships naturally work and evolve.
Keep the Relationship Warm
With few exceptions, you wouldn’t ignore a friend for months or years and then expect a favor, right? The same goes for professional contacts. But when work and life get busy and you fall out of touch, it can feel awkward to reach out again. Since networking is a continuous process rather than a one-time event, it helps to create a system to check in with your network and keep your connections alive.
If using a spreadsheet to track your follow-ups feels too cumbersome or over-the-top, there are simpler methods. For example, you can create a special list on your social media platforms for people you want to keep in regular touch with, making it easy to see and engage with their updates, or maybe you set a monthly or quarterly task in your calendar to reach out. After a call with a potential referral source, I set an email reminder to catch up with them again three or so months later using a tool called FollowUpThen. When that reminder hits my inbox, I can either snooze it or take action on it right away, based on my bandwidth at the time. That way my networking efforts are top of mind without overwhelming me.
But what do you say when you reach out again? You might let the person know how their guidance has paid off for you: “I took your advice on [topic], and it really made a difference in [specific outcome]. Thanks for steering me right!” You can also update your contact on what you’ve been up to, since they may now have more of a vested interest in you. If six months or more have passed since you last spoke, a face-to-face meeting is ideal, if possible, to rekindle the emotional connection that email or text can’t match.
Remember, the little things also go a long way, too. For example, say you learn your contact is getting a new pet or they’re running a marathon. Check in with them to see how it’s going to show you actually care about them as a person, and not only about what they can do for you. A friend of mine did just that, and it paid off. When her colleague’s baby was born, my friend was one of the first to congratulate her, thanks to the note she’d put in her calendar. That small gesture helped cement their relationship, and down the line, it even led to the colleague sending my friend some business.
Adapted from the book MANAGING UP: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge by Melody Wilding. Copyright © 2025 by Melody Wilding. Published in the United States and Canada by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
