The first few weeks of joining a new organization are daunting. You set up your hardware, undergo mandated H.R. training, and meet a flurry of new names and faces. In addition, onboarding experiences vary wildly in quality and effectiveness: you may receive a lot of assistance and instruction or very little. Rather than solely relying on your new team to get situated in your new environment, take a proactive approach to getting your bearings—create a relationship map.
Defining Relationship Maps
A relationship map is a diagram of your organization's essential teams, people, and resources.
Relationship maps show a limited number of people across many teams bounded by your position in the corporate hierarchy. They describe relevant resources under the control of these individuals, how they might help each other, and the manager of that person or team.
Unlike stakeholder maps, relationship maps consider the entire organization, not just people on a specific project. They also differ from organizational charts as they're not comprehensive listings of reporting structures.
How Relationship Maps Help
Identify Gaps and Risks
Relationship maps highlight gaps in your understanding of your colleagues. If you have trouble filling out the map details, that’s a sign you need to do some research or interact with colleagues and ask them targeted questions. This work will also provide insight into internal conflicts and UX skeptics (or allies) that may affect your future UX projects.
Clarify Priorities
Relationships require at least some effort to develop and maintain, but not all work relationships offer the same benefits. Relationship maps force you to reckon with the reality of your finite resources and acknowledge colleagues' influence over your UX role. Whom you prefer to associate with may not align with those you need to associate with to be successful.
Easier Recall
A well-crafted visualization is easier to reference than fragmented conversations with your boss or colleagues. Even a mid-sized organization has too many potential relationships to track in your head.
Efficient Onboarding and Tracking
UX managers can prepare their new employee’s initial relationship map well before their start date. The relationship map can also help UX managers or supervisors coach employees and track their efforts to integrate into the organization.
Why Work Relationships Are Important
Why bother going to such lengths to map work relationships? Because junior UX professionals (and some stubborn senior ones) may devalue the importance of these relationships, despite their various benefits to UX professionals.
Improved Impact
UX jobs are highly collaborative. Unlike a salesperson acquiring a new customer for an organization, typical UX deliverables like journey maps, prototypes, research reports, and design systems rarely produce immediate and obviously beneficial outcomes by themselves. UX contributions typically require our colleagues to process and act upon them in order to generate long-term value. In addition, your impeccably executed UX research will have diminished influence if your colleagues don't trust you.
Boosted Creativity
Relationships also fuel problem solving and creativity. Studies by Abraham Carmeli, Jane Dutton, and Ashley Hardin suggest that people who relate to others with positive regard and empathy engage in more reflective, problem-solving exchanges with colleagues and, as a result, are more creative. This phenomenon should be familiar to any designer, as generating lots of ideas from various sources and recombining those ideas lead to a better design.
Greater Resources and Knowledge
People in organizations control access to systems, other people, and data. While it may be tempting to focus on one or two individuals, you can gain helpful information by casting your relationship net wide. Research by Daniel Levin, Rob Cross, and Lisa Abrams suggests that we can acquire valuable knowledge at work even from colleagues with whom we have weak — yet trustworthy— relationships, not just from those with whom we have strong, trusting relationships.
Better Health
Humans are social animals that require relationships to thrive. A study by John Helliwell and Robert Putnam found that personal and professional relationships are strongly linked to our perceived happiness and satisfaction. If you’re working as a UX team of 1, your environment will put you at greater risk for physiological and emotional stress. Without a UX team's resources and preestablished relationships, you'll need to invest more effort into building relationships while creating awareness of UX's benefits.
How to Create a Relationship Map
Use the template at the end of this article to create your relationship map and follow these steps.
- Start with you in the center and your boss above you. Never forget that your direct manager is your most important relationship to cultivate. Also, include any dotted-line reporting structures common in matrix team models. These people may not have authority over your day-to-day tasks, but your boss (if they're good at their job) will seek their input about your performance at review time.
- Include your boss's boss. Even if your interactions are limited, pay particular attention to meetings, tasks, or metrics involving this person. They wield substantial influence over your career and over promotions in this organization.
- List several team members you expect to collaborate with closely. (Don't map all team members.) Focus on people at your level of seniority or at most one level higher than you. The more hierarchical distance between you and another person, the less you can interact, understand, or influence them.
- For each person on your relationship map, brainstorm answers to these questions:
- What relevant resources or knowledge does this person control?
- How could I help this person perform their job more effectively?
- How could this person help me achieve my goals at a minimal cost to themselves?
If you experience difficulties answering these questions, that's a clue that there are deficits in your understanding. For example, if you're unsure how you could help a person work more effectively, you may not fully understand how they're measured and evaluated.
- Identify another team in your organization. Reference an existing organizational chart, if available. Prioritize teams that control access or data related to the users of your product or service.
- Repeat steps 3 through 5 until you've mapped fewer than 10 teams or 20 people to keep relationship mapping readable and practical.
- Update your relationship map regularly (once every 3–6 months is a good start). Additions can include: new resources someone manages, metrics or goals, new reporting structures, or organizational allies and critics. If you tried interacting with someone, reflect on the outcome — did they find your assistance helpful? Did they decline your offer? Revise your thinking and your map; identify others in comparable roles that could provide similar resources or help to you and seek them out.
If you made your relationship map, show it to your manager and ask for their feedback and perspective. You may be surprised by the organizational details your boss knew but never thought to share with you! Also, remember to use the map periodically as a facilitation aid with your boss to plan future relationship-building activities.
Relationship-Building Tactics
Then use these relationship-building tactics for anyone on your relationship map:
- Look for opportunities to start conversations with them. Use their name frequently. Draw upon your UX research skills and be a good listener. It's surprising how just echoing a person's words (a useful technique in usability testing) can subtly nudge someone to be more forthcoming. Remote workers will need to be creative and persistent: organize remote coffee chats and engage them in special interest communities or guilds, employee-resource groups, or similar socializing activities with renewed purpose and focus.
- Share brief user-research insights that might inform or benefit their projects.
- Prioritize their requests for assistance. Even if you must reduce the scope of their request to fit your bandwidth and schedule, try to remain helpful. Avoid saying outright, “No, I can’t.” Some examples:
- “I don’t have the bandwidth to create a prototype for you right now, but I could facilitate a 1-hour sketching workshop with your team to get you started. Would that be helpful?”
- “Let’s brainstorm a few proposals together that take varying amounts of time and effort. I can then run them by my boss for you and get their feedback.”
- “I have office hours from 2:00–4:00 on Tuesdays. If that works for your schedule, why don’t you swing by and we can talk about this in more detail?”
- Offer to schedule a monthly, 15 or 30-minute one-on-one session with individuals, particularly those heavily involved in your day-to-day job duties such as engineering or product management. Always frontload these sessions with updates and information that might be relevant to their goals before making inquiries or requests yourself.
- Send them sincere praise when you hear of their successes or promotions.
- Propose small special projects to further their goals. For example, if you learn that your colleague in marketing is having challenges with a recently launched website redesign, discuss the possibility of running a quick usability test for them and inform your boss of the opportunity.
- Chat with them over coffee or lunch if you work in the same location. Cover the cost or submit the expense report if that option is available (always clear this with your boss first). For distributed teams, make it a priority to check in with these individuals during in-person teambuilding events.
- If you have a productive collaboration with someone, send positive feedback to their manager and describe how their collaboration helped you and the organization.
These tactics are not callous manipulation. Dale Carnegie famously wrote that one of the best ways to influence people is to take a sincere and genuine interest in them. Appreciation and encouragement cost you very little, and the potential gains in knowledge, resources, or social capital can be substantial.
It’s easier to foster relationships with people you may already like or who are similar to you in some way. But perhaps you’ve had negative experiences with someone on your relationship map, and using these tactics seems challenging. Was it a disagreement over a design tradeoff? Or the disappointing execution of a design deliverable? Relationship maps are a helpful reminder of opportunity costs and the potential benefits you’re giving up by allowing a critical relationship to wither. Assuming the issues were professional disagreements and not toxic workplace behaviors, consider restarting a dialog with that person or making amends. Good UX professionals extend empathy to their users. Great UX professionals extend it to their colleagues, too.
A Helpful Management Technique
UX managers can jump-start a new hire’s relationship map by sharing their organizational knowledge and experiences. During their new hire’s onboarding process, help build their relationship map and explain your suggestions. Over time, ask the new employee for status updates in your one-on-one meetings with them. Do they have examples of how they’re trying to cultivate these relationships?
If your new hire is a remote team member, acknowledge that remote relationships take more effort, yet they counteract the risk of isolation. Give your remote reports explicit permission to allocate time each month towards developing these relationships.
Not only does this help the employee’s well-being and productivity, but it’s also a smart retention strategy. Research by D.P. Moynihan and S.K. Pandey suggests employees with more work relationships are more committed to their organization and less likely to turnover. As our research on hiring and retention has shown, UX managers have room to improve on keeping their teams together, especially when UX maturity is low.
Conclusion
Building social capital in your new UX job is essential for your job effectiveness and your mental health. By mapping your relationships, you'll prioritize who to invest your energy towards, develop allies, access new resources, and grow UX into a respected and indispensable part of your organization. Don't sit back and expect people to come to you; take ownership of this activity and seek them out instead with thoughtful, planned purpose. You may be able to achieve results you never thought possible, and, who knows — you might make some friends along the way.
References
John F. Helliwell and Robert D. Putnam. 2004. The Social Context of Well-Being. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 359 (2004), 1435–46. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1522
Dale Carnegie. 2013. How to Win Friends & Influence People, Gallery Books, New York, NY.
D.P. Moynihan and S.K. Pandey. 2007. The Ties That Bind: Social Networks, Person-Organization Value Fit, and Turnover Intention. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18, 2 (2007), 205–227. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mum013
Daniel Z. Levin and Rob Cross. 2004. The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. Management Science 50, 11 (2004), 1477–1490. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1030.0136
Abraham Carmeli, Jane E. Dutton, and Ashley E. Hardin. 2015. Respect as an Engine For New Ideas: Linking Respectful Engagement, Relational Information Processing and Creativity Among Employees and Teams. Human Relations 68, 6 (May 2015), 1021–1047. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018726714550256
