Relationship Mapping: Strategically

Focus on Key People

Summary: When starting a new role, create a relationship map to identify
your company's key people and resources to prioritize relationship-building
efforts.
By

• Evan Sunwall

on August 13, 2023

Topics:

• Managing UX Teams

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Download a relationship-map template at the end of this article, or view and

download the Miro-board version.

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.

On This Page:

• What Are Relationship Maps

• How Relationship Maps Help
• Why Work Relationships Are Important
• How to Create a Relationship Map
• Relationship-Building Tactics
• A Helpful Management Technique
• Conclusion
• References

What Are Relationship Maps

A relationship map is a diagram of your organization's essential teams,

people, and resources.

Definition: 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.
A UX designer's relationship map illustrates colleagues, the resources
under their control, and opportunities to help each other.

How Relationship Maps Help

Creating a relationship map helps UX professionals in several ways:

Identify gaps & 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. For each person on your relationship map, brainstorm answers to
these questions:
o What relevant resources or knowledge does this person
control?
o How could I help this person perform their job more effectively?
o 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.

5. 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.
6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 until you've mapped fewer than 10 teams
or 20 people to keep relationship mapping readable and practical.
 7. 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:
o “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?”
o “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.”
o “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