’Tis the Season to Reflect on Your Professional Relationships

The holiday season is a time for celebration — and it’s also a prime opportunity to nurture your professional relationships. People are typically more open, reflective, and in a positive mindset during this time of year. Leveraging that mood to reestablish ties and rekindle connections can create a foundation for lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. Whether you’re looking to advance your career, grow your business, or develop more meaningful connections with others for your mental and emotional well-being, strengthening your relationships can be a powerful way to achieve those goals. It’s often through our networks that unexpected job offers, partnerships, or collaborations arise, making it crucial — and worthwhile — to invest in these relationships. Here are three easy steps to take advantage of the momentum of the holidays to foster deeper connections that carry into the new year. 1. Review your relationships. Taking stock of your relationships and professional connections will help you determine who you want to reconnect or strengthen your bond with, as well as which relationships no longer serve you. First, create a list of colleagues, connections, and professional acquaintances from your phone contact list, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. Then, build a three-column table with the headers: Active Relationship, Infrequent Relationship, Lost/No Relationship. Distribute your contacts into those three columns. Just like a stop light with red for stop, green for go, and yellow for caution, in each column, highlight the relationships you want to maintain or strengthen in green and the ones you’re no longer interested in maintaining in red. Red doesn’t mean you need to cut people off right away; it just means you won’t be putting in effort. Highlight the contacts you are unsure about in yellow. When looking at reestablishing or deepening a relationship, it’s never all about your needs or desires. Relationships are mutual investments in each other’s lives, successes, and failures. Therefore, it’s important to look at not only what the relationship brings to your life, but what value you can bring the relationship. For the people you’re unsure how to categorize (your yellow highlights), ask yourself these three questions: Can this relationship help me take steps toward achieving my personal and professional goals, or will it only help them achieve their goals? Do I have a positive feeling when I think about my relationship with this person? Can I be authentic around this person? Do they understand me and I understand them? If you answer no to any of those questions, consider what specifically stops you from wanting to maintain or strengthen the relationship. For example, even though you can answer yes to the second and third questions for a particular person, perhaps your analysis reveals that you’re putting in all the effort into your relationship with them, so it doesn’t feel mutual. That imbalance makes you feel self-conscious that you’re bugging the person or they don’t see the value in the relationship. Letting go of certain connections, even if they seem meaningful and valuable to you, can create room for new, more meaningful relationships. The goal is to focus your energy on the connections that matter most when it comes to enhancing your overall well-being, fulfillment, and growth. 2. Reconnect with lost connections. Aside from a chance encounter at a holiday party or event, it will take effort to reignite a connection with someone you’ve lost touch with. Just making the effort to reconnect, even if it’s not the right time for the other person, shows you’re open to creating a future relationship. A simple, personalized message can be the perfect icebreaker to reconnect. Acknowledge the time that has passed since you last communicated, express your genuine interest in their life or career, and reference a shared experience. For example: Hey Steve! It has been too many years since we were last in touch. I saw your post that you just started your own business. Congratulations! I would love to hear more about it and see if I can offer any advice or guidance. A lot has changed in my world too since we went to that wild baseball game where you caught that home run ball, and I would be happy to fill you in. Would you like to reconnect in the coming weeks? Another way to approach a former relationship would be to mention a mutual connection — for example, “I noticed you commented on Janice’s LinkedIn post. I knew Janice from our days at XYZ company. What a small world!” Rebuilding relationships can feel like starting from nothing, even if you share a substantial history. However, you can use curiosity about another person’s life to dissolve any awkwardness and create a two-way conversation that helps reestablish the bond. Asking thoughtful, open-ended questions and showing genuine interest in their journey will rekindle an authentic connection. When it’s your turn to share, catch them up on your challenges, milestones, and growth since you last spoke. 3. Nurture connections for lasting impact. While reconnecting is an important first step, maintaining and strengthening relationships requires consistent, thoughtful follow-ups. Regular check-ins, rather than sporadic outreach, are essential to nurture the bond and demonstrate that the connection truly matters to you. Otherwise, the effort you put into rebuilding can easily fade away. For example, I had a colleague from my lawyer days, let’s call her Stacy, with whom I was once very close. When she moved to my town, I thought it would be easy to reconnect, but our lives were so busy — kids of different ages, work demands, and other commitments made it difficult to find time. We were fond of each other and shared a lot in common, but years passed without meaningful interaction. Finally, I realized how much I missed her presence in my life and decided to make a more concerted effort. I invited her to lunch and we talked for three hours, catching up on everything from work to family. That one meal turned into a quarterly lunch — a cadence we were both able to make work with our schedules. Our conversations have become a wonderful respite from the daily grind and, over time, we’ve rebuilt that deep bond we once had. Recently, Stacy even approached me to provide executive coaching and workshops for her company — a reminder that the professional and personal often intertwine in powerful ways when relationships are nurtured. Consistency truly matters when it comes to relationships, and the holiday season offers a natural springboard for reengaging. Once you’ve reestablished the connection, commit to connecting at a cadence that makes sense for both of you. • • • Consider revisiting your analysis of your connections yearly to take stock of which relationships have created value in your life and which are faltering and require additional effort. Thoughtfully strengthening bonds — and letting go of relationships that no longer serve you — will help you build a more robust and meaningful network for you and your connections’ future professional and personal growth.

’Tis the Season to Reflect on Your Professional Relationships

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