Why the Lessons of Your Business Classes Don’t Work: The Missing Foundation of Relationships

This paper will attempt to understand the lubrication that makes the skills that education, MBA classes, and training provided by mentors work and why it is imperative to the successful implementation of not only business skills but life skills. This lubrication, relationship skills, will be broken down into three components: Respect, Rapport and Trust.

Considering the current pandemic, any discussion of relationship skills would not be complete without bringing up the impact technology has on building respect, rapport and trust. In addition, in today’s global workplace, culture also has an impact on relationship skills.

This paper was written not to minimize the importance of the “hard” skills, such as accounting, scheduling and budgeting, rather to discuss how to make them work more effectively by introducing an often-missing foundation to those skills.