The best professional relationships in your life probably don’t feel professional. At least not anymore.
Think about the people in your orbit right now, the ones you actually call when something goes sideways, the ones you’d refer without hesitation, the ones who have been with you through two or three companies, maybe more. When you trace those relationships back to where they started, they probably didn’t begin with polish. They began with something real.
I want to talk about that today, because I think most of us have been handed a version of professional relationship-building that is fundamentally broken. The leaders who figure that out early are the ones who spend less time networking and more time building something that actually lasts.
The Performance of Professionalism
Let me name something that most of us know but rarely say out loud.
Most professional interactions are performances. You walk into a meeting, a networking event, or a client dinner, and both parties are running a kind of script. How was the flight? Tell me about your background. What does your firm specialize in? We should connect. It’s not insincere, exactly. It’s managed. Careful. You’re presenting a version of yourself that has been edited for the room.
In Ep. 34, I talked about performance theater within organizations, how leaders optimize for optics over outcomes, and speaking fluently about strategy without committing to anything actionable. Goffman called this impression management, the process by which people attempt to control the impressions others form of them. What I want to name here is that the same dynamic plays out in our external relationships, at the cocktail party, the industry conference, the client dinner. The setting changes. The mechanism is identical. You’re performing a version of yourself rather than simply being yourself.
And here’s the real cost of that. When you’re performing, you’re not learning. You’re not paying attention to the person across from you in any genuine way. You’re waiting for your next line.
I’ve been in professional services for over two decades, across e-discovery, managed digital services, and legal technology consulting. The relationships that have actually moved the needle in my career, the ones that led to new opportunities, meaningful referrals, introductions to people who changed the course of my work, those relationships did not begin with a performance. They began with a conversation in which both people dropped the script and became genuinely interested in each other. That crossing point is what I want to unpack, because it doesn’t happen by accident, and it’s not beyond your control.
The Crossing Point
About twenty years ago, I started building relationships with two people I’ll call Adam and Bob. Both worked in adjacent spaces to mine. Both were professionals I had legitimate business reasons to know.
For a while, those relationships looked like most professional relationships look: useful, pleasant, appropriately transactional. We’d connect when there was a reason to connect. We’d share what was relevant and hold back what wasn’t.
At some point, something shifted. It happened differently with each of them, but the mechanism was the same.
We got curious about each other.
With Adam, I started asking real questions about how his firm made technology decisions, not because I was selling anything, but because I genuinely wanted to understand his thinking. Why did he choose one platform over another? What was the architecture behind that choice? He started asking me the same kinds of questions back. What was I seeing in the market? How was I thinking about a particular problem? We stopped transacting and started learning from each other.
With Bob, the dynamic was similar. We were both running different parts of different businesses, and at some point our conversations became a place where we could think out loud, test ideas, and ask the uncomfortable questions you can’t ask inside your own organization. Bob told me once, directly and without hedging, not to take a particular job. Flat out told me it was the wrong move for me. That kind of honesty doesn’t live in a transactional relationship. It shows up when someone is genuinely invested in your outcome, not just the next interaction.
Twenty years later, Adam and Bob are two of the most important people in my professional life. Adam once convinced me to make a career move that turned out to be exactly right. Bob has introduced me to people who changed the direction of my work.
None of that was planned. All of it became possible because, at some point, both of those relationships crossed from professional to real. The question worth sitting with is what created the conditions for that crossing.
Mutual Curiosity As A Strategy
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. The crossing point isn’t a moment of vulnerability, though vulnerability can do it. It isn’t a shared crisis, though those accelerate things. It isn’t simply time, though time helps.
The crossing point happens when both people in a relationship stop performing and start learning.
Mutual curiosity. That’s the mechanism.
I want to be specific about what that means, because it’s different from what most relationship advice tells you. Finding common ground is fine. Asking about someone’s hobbies, their family, their team, those conversations have their place. What I’m describing goes deeper. It’s genuine intellectual curiosity about how someone thinks, about the choices they’ve made and why, about what they know that you don’t, about where their model of the world diverges from yours, and what that gap might teach you.
When that kind of curiosity is mutual, something changes. The other person feels it. It’s not flattery, and it’s not a networking technique. It’s respect. People respond to being genuinely respected in a way that they simply don’t respond to being charmed or pitched.
In Ep. 38, I laid out the Curiosity Cycle and how asking better questions changes not just your communication but your culture. The same principle applies here, in your external relationships, with clients, with peers, with the people you want to know for the next twenty years. Authentic curiosity is the practice. The relationship is the outcome.
The Virtuous Cycle
I want to bring in one more thread here, because it connects directly to what I explored in Ep. 55 on reputation.
In that episode, I framed reputation as a compounding ledger. Every interaction either makes a deposit or a withdrawal. Over time, the ledger builds into something that precedes you into every room.
Relationships compound the same way, through a different kind of mechanism.
I know someone in client services who no longer needs to take new clients. Her existing clients stay. They refer others. Those referrals arrive pre-qualified, because the people who sent them already know exactly who she is and what she brings. New relationships start from a warmer, more honest place because they arrive with context and trust already built in.
That’s not circumstance. That’s the outcome of years of showing up in a specific way. Being genuinely present. Caring about client outcomes rather than transactions. Being, to borrow the language from Raving Fans, the kind of professional people talk about.
What I think is underappreciated about her situation is this: her clients aren’t just loyal because she’s skilled at what she does. They’re loyal because they fit. She has a particular quality, a directness, a lack of pretense, and the people who value those qualities found her and stayed. The ones who didn’t fit didn’t stay. That’s fine. That’s the point.
This is what I mean when I say you are the filter. The quality of your professional relationships over time is a function of how authentically you show up. Authenticity attracts alignment. Alignment creates loyalty. Loyalty, compounded over years, generates the kind of referral cycle that means you stop chasing clients and start choosing them.
What this Means for Leaders
Let me bring this back to leadership specifically, because there’s a layer here that goes beyond client development.
If you manage a team, your people are watching how you show up in relationships. They’re watching whether your interest in them is real or managed. They’re watching whether you ask genuine questions or just good-sounding ones. They’re watching whether you’re curious about how they think, not just what they produce.
The leaders who build genuinely loyal, high-performing teams are almost always the ones who have crossed the same threshold with their people that I described with Adam and Bob. They stopped managing the performance of leadership and started being genuinely curious about the humans they work alongside.
In Ep. 49, I argued that a team worth belonging to is built on something real, not on a mission statement or a quarterly theme. The through-line across all of these episodes is the same. Authenticity is the mechanism. Curiosity is the daily practice. And the outcome, whether it’s a client relationship that spans two decades or a team that stays through a hard season, is built from that same foundation.
Most of what we’ve been taught about professional relationship-building is a skill you practice on other people. You learn the opener, the follow-up, and the LinkedIn connection request. You get better at the performance.
What I’m suggesting is different, and it’s simpler. The most important thing you can do for your professional relationships is drop the performance and get genuinely curious about the person across from you, about what they know, about how they think, about what they’re trying to figure out. That curiosity, when it’s real, is what moves a relationship from transactional to lasting. And lasting relationships are where the real work of a career happens.
So the question I’ll leave you with is this.
Are you actually curious about the people in your professional orbit, or are you just being cordial? Because there’s a difference. And the people worth knowing can always tell.
Key Takeaways
Performative professionalism in external relationships, at conferences, client dinners, and industry events, works by the same mechanism as performative leadership inside organizations. Goffman called it impression management. Either way, the performance crowds out the genuine connection.
The transition from transactional to real occurs when both people stop performing and start learning from each other. Mutual curiosity, genuine intellectual interest in how someone thinks, is the mechanism that creates it.
You are the filter. Authenticity attracts alignment. Over time, the right people find you, stay, and send others who are similarly aligned.
The virtuous cycle of great client relationships is built on a consistent, genuine presence, not on the volume of outreach or the sophistication of the pitch.
For leaders, this applies internally too. Your team is watching whether your interest in them is real. Genuine curiosity about the people you lead is a practice, and its effects compound over time.
