Building Relationships and Well-Being: Foundations for a Thriving Workplace
There is a saying that goes, "No man is an island." The same is true in everyone's personal and professional journey.
My McKinsey Forward journey taught me that building relationships and well-being are essential skills for the future of work, where rapidly changing technological infrastructure, business models, and workplace dynamics are prevalent. The relationships one builds are crucial to success, whether in personal or professional endeavours.
The human element, through relationships and deep connections, becomes more relevant in the age of technological advancements, as machines can never replicate these nuances.
On the other hand, McKinsey has also identified maintaining well-being as an essential skill for the future of work. After all, no one can fill an empty cup.
Your Optimal Well-Being
Like career goals, you should also set well-being goals that include physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual health. Setting well-being goals allows you to compare your current battery levels in each aspect versus your optimal well-being. In doing so, think about how your ideal self will look when he/she wakes up early in the morning and before sleeping at night.
Your version of your ideal self can also serve as a benchmark compared to your current well-being state, revealing some improvement areas that require attention. For example, imagine your well-being goal is getting six to eight hours of sleep daily. However, you noticed that you slept only five hours a day. I recommend looking at your current habits and a day in your life. You may uncover sneaky vices like doomscrolling on social media, checking your work emails at night, or slacking off on your meal prep plan. This should lead to mitigating actions such as activating Sleep Mode on your mobile phone, separating work and personal devices, and simplifying your meal plans for busier periods.
Building Relationships through AVEC
Even in the most specialised roles, you will never be successful without the people around you. That meant you must invest some effort and time in building and nurturing trust-based relationships through vulnerability, attention, compassion, and empathy. I learned the AVEC framework that can be used in building strong relationships during the Forward program. It stands for Attention, Vulnerability, Empathy, and Compassion. Let’s explore each of these through an actual example:
Imagine you are a risk professional attending a networking conference and participating in one of those breakout sessions with other people in your field. You are meeting with a group of people and think it’s a good time to build a meaningful professional relationship.
Applying the AVEC framework from the McKinsey Forward would look something like this:
Attention:
Practice active listening by maintaining eye contact, focusing fully on what your counterpart is saying, and asking thoughtful follow-up questions. Avoid distractions such as redirecting eye contact and checking your smartphone. This shows you are genuinely interested in them as people and as fellow professionals in the field.
Vulnerability:
Along the conversation, let's say your counterpart shared his struggles about implementing a new GRC tool for their risk and compliance programs. More likely than not, you have experienced something similar. You can share that you have faced similar challenges and bring up the idea of learning from each other. By openly discussing your experience and challenges, you demonstrate authenticity. In turn, this shows taht you value honest conversations over the usual smooth-running success stories.
Empathy:
It's good to respond with understanding of your counterpart's struggles rather than quickly saying things like "it's easy to solve." This runs off as quick judgment on your part. Instead, you can acknowledge the nature of the struggle and express support, perhaps offering some resources that you know of or your own experience of how you overcame a similar challenge.
Compassion:
As a follow-up, it's good to check in with your new connection on how they're doing on the challenge and see if there are other resources or solicited advice you can offer. This could be done by understanding the context of the problem.AVEC can also be practised when working with internal stakeholders, especially those in cross-functional teams. Looking back, I realise that knowing AVEC would have helped me with many of the difficult stakeholders I faced in the past.
Psychological Safety = Better Performance
The role of leadership in psychological safety was one of the most important lessons I learned from my Leadership and Teams class during my MBA. The other day, I saw a headline titled “Bosses are done playing nice” on my LinkedIn news feed. Upon further reading, I found that this headline assumes that performance levels have an inverse relationship with “being nice” or psychological safety. This may look like the case in the short run, but forward-thinking leaders know better.
Research shows a direct relationship between psychological safety and team performance. The more psychologically safe the team feels, the higher the team's performance. [3] To set the stage, the first step is understanding the current team's perception of psychological safety and focusing on clarity and outcomes. Understanding the current perception of psychological safety can help uncover what else can be improved to drive team performance further. This would also reveal the team's challenges and ambiguities that stop them from speaking up. On the flip side, having clear and actionable goals with tangible expected outcomes. That would prevent the team from certain stress and wasted efforts stemming from mindlessly shooting into the void. This can be done through clearly and explicitly documented performance goals with measurable outcomes.
Now that the basics are in place, it’s time to take it to the next level: cementing the ideal psychologically safe environment. This could be done by valuing contributions, coaching and supporting the team, building a human connection with the team, encouraging feedback, and allowing for space to fail safely. Appreciation and coaching let the team know they are valued and supported, which sets them up for success. Building connections also strengthens connections, leading to a more collaborative environment. Finally, allowing teams to fail safely also presents learning opportunities for the team to maximise team performance.
Overall, we must create an environment where everyone is not afraid of speaking up, failing safely, and looking forward to learn from each other. A psychologically safe environment improves not only well-being but also performance in the long run.
Vulnerability ≠ Weakness
There is confusion about whether one’s vulnerability is a weakness. However, this is no longer true in the current age. Looking back, I remember a big shift from the “you should know this by now” mindset to a learner mindset in early 2020 when COVID-19 hit. Gone are the days when you could be successful by faking it until you make it. There is a lot of noise in professional networking sites like LinkedIn that this mindset is emerging again.
According to McKinsey, vulnerability allows leaders to express their authentic selves and build trusting relationships. Being vulnerable demonstrates a leader’s ability to have honest conversations about challenges and uncertainties, leading to increased trust and credibility. [4] Putting the challenges out in the open, while advocating for psychological safety, will help drive learning, innovation, and performance within teams and organisations.
References:
[1] Clark, J. (2025, May 30). Psychological safety in remote and virtual teams. Psychsafety. https://psychsafety.com/psychological-safety-in-remote-teams/
[2] McKinsey & Company. (2021). Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Organization/Our%20Insights/Psychological%20safety%20and%20the%20critical%20role%20of%20leadership%20development/Psychological-safety-and-the-critical-role-of-leadership-development-final.pdf1
[3] Kwon, S., Lee, H., & Choi, T. (2020). How psychological safety affects team performance: Mediating role of efficacy and learning behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1581. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01581
[4] Maor, D., Kaas, H.-W., Strovink, K., & Srinivasan, R. (2024, November 4). How leaders can tap the power of vulnerability. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/how-leaders-can-tap-the-power-of-vulnerability