My boss loves my work, but a couple of my peers won’t work with me. Should I be worried?

Here is a question I ask almost every executive I coach. Who are the three people you most need to work well with to be successful and happy at work? Most leaders name them fast. Very few can tell me the last time they sat down with all three.

That gap is the most common blind spot I see, at every level. Most leaders would never name their relationships as their glass ceiling, and it’s truer than they realize. You can crush your numbers, and if you have dead bodies in your rearview mirror, it isn’t sustainable.

I once coached a VP who did everything his COO asked, and did it brilliantly. His boss praised him loudly and often. He believed that if you please the boss, you stay safe, and for two years that was true. But he had invested up and down and nothing sideways, and more than one peer had put a stake in the ground that they wouldn’t work with him. When the COO was fired, the protection went with him. Two months later, my client was out too.

Your happiness at work is only as strong as your least happy relationship at work. When one of those relationships is strained, it’s nearly impossible to be fully engaged, fully effective, or ready for the next opportunity.

My relationship with a peer has gone sideways. How do I fix it without making it worse?

Meet weekly, and longer, until it’s healthy. Fifteen minutes every two weeks is maintenance, and a strained relationship is past maintenance. It’s in repair. Four guidelines carry the rest:

1. Extend trust from day one. Don’t make coworkers earn it. If trust gets broken, say so directly and talk it out right away. Conflict that festers without a name drags down results, alignment and engagement.
2. Put formal one-on-ones on the calendar. With your most important relationships, a minimum of fifteen minutes every two weeks, protected and not cancelled casually. A relationship with no calendared touchpoint will drift.
3. End every one of those meetings with five words: “How can I help you?” They tell the other person their success matters to you, and they catch small tensions before they turn into fractures.
4. Commit to mediation when you need it. If the two of you can’t resolve it, take it to a senior leader together. Some relationships need a tiebreaker to reset, and there’s no shame in using one.

I’m not in conflict with anyone at work, so why do I keep hearing I need to build relationships?

Because the absence of conflict is not the presence of trust. Dig a little deeper and there is almost always more tension than you thought.

A leader I’ll call Gary told me his relationship with his teammate John was great: strong rapport, fully in sync. Two days later I asked John the same question. John said it had been a struggle getting on the same page, and that sometimes he thought Gary was a jerk. I asked them to commit to a weekly twenty-minute meeting, open, honest, candid and caring. A few months later both told me, separately, that it was going extremely well. Their communication styles were so different that without those meetings neither would have known why they kept struggling.

Smart leaders let this slide for one of four reasons. They think good relationships shouldn’t take work. They think not being at war means things are fine. They think results are all that matter. Or, most often, they just neglect it: the calendar fills with execution and peers get squeezed out.

A peer and I can’t agree, and it’s affecting our teams. When should I escalate?

As soon as it’s clear the two of you can’t resolve it between you. Take it to a senior leader together. Letting conflict sit is always the worse option.