The Most Underrated Driver of Performance? Relationship-Building
In today’s fast-moving, cross-functional work environments, the ability to build strong professional relationships is a performance driver. Yet, according to our recent survey of tech leaders, while 85% of professionals say relationship-building is very important to their success, 30% report struggling to maintain strong professional connections. Even more concerning: 26% say they prefer to work alone, even when collaboration would deliver better outcomes.
For organizations investing in collaboration tools, agile workflows, or cross-functional innovation, this signals a soft skills gap that software alone can’t fix.
Trust Is the Infrastructure for Speed
Modern work environments require alignment, adaptability, and rapid collaboration across silos, time zones, and functions. But, when trust is weak and work is isolated or siloed, even high-performing employees underdeliver.
Skiilify’s study found four major obstacles impeding relationship-building on teams:
1. Time scarcity (23%) – Interactions become transactional, not relational.
2. Lack of relational skill-building (15%) – Many employees were never taught how to build and maintain professional trust.
3. Over-reliance on solo execution (26%) – Independence morphs into siloed effort.
4. Erosion of relationships over time (30%) – Especially in hybrid and virtual teams, strong connections fade without intentional reinforcement.
Individually, each of these will chip away at team cohesion. Collectively, they slow decisions, dilute accountability, and increase friction in every cross-functional collaboration.
It’s a myth that relationship-building skills “come naturally” to top performers. These relationship-building capabilities, like trust-building, constructive disagreement, and mutual accountability, must be developed just like any other critical skill.
Why Soft Skills Need to Be Built, Not Assumed
At Skiilify, we develop tools that help your people build essential soft skills like relationship-building, curiosity, resilience, and cultural agility, at scale. Our platform goes beyond one-off workshops or personality assessments. It embeds micro-practices into daily work, encouraging:
· An awareness of your competencies and how to build them
· Coaching for the behaviors that build trust and maintaining professional connections over time
· Practical strategies for initiating collaboration and surfacing blockers early, especially in functionally or geographically diverse teams
Our tools are giving individuals and teams the skills to work more effectively, especially when complexity increases. Your organization may have great talent, great tech, and great intentions. But if the relationships across your teams are weak, everything slows down, especially when the pressure is on.
Relationship-building matters. Let’s talk about how to build it.