10 Tips for Dealing With the Every Day People in Your Workplace

Building relationships with your coworkers fuels success for you at work

No matter your job or your workplace, dealing with people effectively is a must for success. Dealing with people successfully every day will make work more fun and inspiring. Dealing with people is both a joy and a challenge.

But, dealing with people successfully is the most significant factor in determining whether you will have the impact and influence you need to accomplish your mission at work. Dealing with people effectively is a skill that you can learn. Here is how you can become the most successful at dealing with people at work.

Demonstrate Respect at Work

Coworkers working on project in office
Buero Monaco / Taxi / Getty Images

Ask anyone in your workplace what treatment they most want at work. They will likely top their list with the desire to be treated with dignity and respect. You can demonstrate respect with simple, yet powerful actions.

Demonstrating respect is the most important interaction that you can have dealing with the everyday people who populate your work life. Here's how to demonstrate respect when you're dealing with people.

Trust and Be Trusted

Coworkers catching a worker in a trust-fall exercise.
Tom Merton / Getty Images

Trust is the cornerstone when dealing with people interdependently at work. Trust forms the foundation for effective communication, positive interpersonal relationships, and employee motivation and contribution of discretionary energy, the extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work.

When trust exists in an organization or in a relationship, almost everything else is easier and more comfortable to achieve. In dealing with people, trust is critical to forming supportive relationships that enable accomplishments and progress.

Provide Feedback With an Impact

Smiling woman giving coworkers her feedback on a paper.
Fiona Jackson-Downes / Getty Images

Feedback is communicated to a person or a team of people regarding the effect their behavior is having on another person, the organization, the customer, or the team. Make your feedback have the impact it deserves by the manner and approach you ​use to deliver feedback.

In dealing with everyday people, your feedback can make a difference if you can avoid a defensive response. How you approach and provide feedback in dealing with people is the difference between effective work relationships and conflict and hard feelings.

Receive Feedback With Grace and Dignity

A worker gracefully receiving constructive feedback from her boss.
Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

Are you interested in how other people view your work? Make it easy for them to tell you. If they think you'll appreciatively consider their feedback, you'll get lots more. And, that is good, really. In dealing with people, objective feedback from people who care about you can stimulate continuous improvement or confirm that you are on the right track.

Feedback allows you to adjust your course and direction in dealing with situations, people, and challenges at work. Your objective in dealing with people and their feedback is to get more - how you receive feedback is the key.

Show Appreciation

Female employee is showing appreciation to her male colleague.
Compassionate Eye Foundation/Steven Errico / Getty Images

You can show appreciation every day when dealing with people. You can tell your colleagues, coworkers, and employees how much you value them and their contribution any day of the year. Trust this fact. No occasion is necessary. In fact, small surprises and tokens of your appreciation spread throughout the year help the people in your work life feel valued all year long.

Demonstrating appreciation in dealing with your everyday people is a powerful way to interact with and demonstrate your care. Your coworkers feel cherished when you are dealing with them as if you really do care about and appreciate them when you do. Fake praise gets you nowhere here.

Build Necessary Alliances

Coworkers standing in a circle with their hands in a pile in the center.
Prasit photo / Getty Images

An ally is an associate who provides assistance and often, friendship. Your allies are likely to support your views and causes. They help solve problems, provide advice, act as a sounding board when you need a listening ear and offer a different perspective so you can view your organization more broadly.

Sometimes allies tell you that you are wrong in your assumptions, uninformed in your choices, and heading in the wrong direction. In dealing with the everyday people in your work world, nothing is more important than having allies who tell you the truth. They are critical to your success at work.

Developing alliances that allow you to accomplish yours and your company's mission is critical. 

Play Well With Others to Develop Effective Relationships

Angry man holding his coworker by the tie.
Prasit photo / Getty Images

You can torpedo your job and career through the relationships you form at work. No matter your education, experience, or title, if you can't play well with others, you won't succeed.

Effective relationships create success and satisfaction on the job. Learn more about seven effective work relationship musts. Combat dealing with difficult people with these work relationship musts.

Overcome Your Fear of Confrontation and Conflict

Fingers pointing at a businessman representing accountability.
SIphotography / Getty Images

Meaningful confrontation is never easy, but the conflict is often necessary if you want to stick up for your rights at work. Whether the confrontation is over shared credit, irritating coworker habits, differing approaches, or about how to keep a project on track, sometimes you need to hold a confrontation with a coworker.

The good news is that while confrontation is almost never your first choice, you can become better and more comfortable with necessary conflict. 

Have Difficult Conversations

Business people gesturing during a heated argument.
fizkes / Getty Images

Have you encountered any of these examples of dealing with difficult people at work? They're just samples of the types of behavior that cry out for responsible feedback.

These steps will help you hold difficult conversations when people need professional feedback. Dealing with a difficult conversation can have positive outcomes.

Consciously Create Team Norms

Coworkers smiling during a meeting.
Hero Images / Getty Images

The members of every team, department, or workgroup develop particular ways of interacting with and dealing with each other over time. Effective interpersonal communication among members and successful communication with managers and employees external to the team are critical components of team functioning.

How a team makes decisions, assigns work, and holds members accountable determines team success. With the potential power of the impact of these interactions on team success, why leave team member interaction to chance? In dealing with an effective team, you need to form team relationship guidelines or team norms early to ensure team success.