It’s all about relationships. Humanity is very social, and everything, everywhere is a popularity contest. Build a network of strong relationshipsto gain support for your ideas and to get promoted. Be friendly and outgoing or end up overlooked.

Many of us work in a department of a company completely oblivious to how management decisions are made. We find out about reorganizations from the announcement that makes the change effective that day, and we wonder why we were not consulted or informed sooner. We find out about major company decisions via the official press release after it is publised in the newspaper. We see someone promoted into a management role, and we have no idea what they were thinking or how that guy got himself the new job. Management’s decisions and discussions happen behind closed doors from us. Everything that management comes up with comes out of a black box.

Why is this? Why doesn’t your boss or any of your boss’s peers bring you into the inner circle and explain what is going on to you before it happens?

It is because of relationships - or the lack thereof.

Human beings are social more than they are anything else. We live in families. We work in companies. We cluster our homes together into cities and even smaller groupings called neighborhoods. We build communities.

Look at the greatest achievements of human beings:

• Music. We entertain one another and express ourselves to one another. We communicate with melodies, rhythms, and beats.
• Writing. We explain how things work, we recount historical events, and we tell entertaining stories by putting letters on paper and screens.
• Transportation. We go from place to place in order to meet with one another and see each other’s creations.
• Architecture. We construct buildings to house multiple people. The most impressive of these have been public works - the Colloseum, the Parthenon, the Capitol Building, the Pyramids of Giza, The Golden Gate Bridge, and St. Peter’s Bascillica.

The greatest achievements of mankind are all designed to bring people together, to take ideas from one person’s mind and put them into another person’s mind, or to facilitate this process. Everything we do has to do with social interaction.

We are social creatures who live in a social world.

If we accept this principle as true, then we must also accept the consequences of its truth.

We need to fit in. If we are the kind of person who does not like to fit in, who insists on expressing rebellious individualism within whatever group we associate ourselves with, we will find ourselves marginalized and perhaps disenfranchised. This suggests that a basic survival skill is to fit in - to conform. In the company of artists covered in tatoos, our refusal to ink our skin is self-destructive. Either ink up, accept your fate and find comfort in it, or leave. In a stock brokerage, either wear a tie or suffer a certain lack of success. Ink up your skin and wear peircings everywhere and you will find yourself marginalized in banking.

We need other people to like us. If we are not liked by others, then we are unlikely to find ourselves placed in a position of leadership. Leaders are seen by all regularly, and no one wants to regularly see someone that they do not like to see. If we are unloved, it is likely that we will not find ourselves given as many chances to prove our innocence if wrongly accused. It is unlikely that supporters will help us when we are injured or ill. We need friends to survive in a social world where the game is social interaction with social rules.

The more friends we have, and the better we fit in, the more successful we will be in all of our undertakings. It may feel good to swim upstream, to push the limits of good taste, to be an in-your-face kind of person. We might even delude ourselves into believing that there are no consequences for this behavior and that we are strong and rugged appearing to others - perhaps even attractive.

Make no mistake - relationships are the key to success at work, in your family, and at school. With wide ranging positive relationships, dare I say popularity, better grades at school come from greater leniency from teachers and from more help from fellow students. With stronger relationships with your boss and peers at work comes more authority and responsibility for the work of others - for as relationships grow, trust grows. Trust is necessary before anyone gives you their money, their business, or their work to watch over for them.

Strengthen your relationships and strengthen yourself.