24. Initiate, invite, include
In your relationships, are you the one who always initiates, or do you wait to be asked?
What?
Giving and receiving social support are both important to the health of our relationships and our overall well-being. But what happens when there’s an imbalance in giving and receiving over time? A study found that both giving and receiving support improve psychological well-being, while:
“… imbalance in the ratio of support given and received was associated with poorer psychological well-being.”
In other words, feeling good—and feeling good about our relationships—relies on a roughly even balance of giving and receiving.
So What?
In relationships, it’s common for one person to disproportionately assume the emotional labor of initiating. One of the biggest pet peeves I hear about friendships is: “I ALWAYS have to initiate.”
This happens in workplaces too—one person feels like they always have to take the first step to get momentum going.
Connecting can feel awkward. Sometimes you just have to embrace it!
It’s not that relationships should be tit for tat—people give in different ways. But when someone doesn’t initiate, it can be easy to jump to the conclusion that they don’t care about the relationship.
Of course there are other reasons … like insecurity. “What if they don’t want to spend time with me?” or what if they accept because they don’t want to hurt my feelings? Cringe. When someone else initiates, you can be confident they really want to spend time with you.
Initiating is vulnerable. But if everyone waits for someone else to initiate, we’d all be sitting around hoping for someone to ask us to do something!
Now What? Connection Practice: Initiate, Invite, Include
To Connect:
Reframe initiating as part of the emotional labor of nurturing your relationship. Think of it like a shared savings—it takes deposits (like initiating) from both sides to stay healthy.
Initiate, invite, include. Invite a co-worker to lunch. Call a friend to catch up. Reach out to someone new.
Repeat and remind. We are extremely sensitive to signals of belonging. It’s not something you establish once and forget about. We need to communicate over and over, “you’re valued, you belong.”
To Build Connection:
Most organizations rely on individuals to do the emotional labor of initiating and building relationships with colleagues. That’s a gamble. Some people will connect, and many (roughly half) will remain disconnected—with consequences to engagement and retention.
Instead, you can systematize connection and embed it into the employee experience.
For example:
Create social cohorts for new hires, to help them connect immediately.
Establish connection rituals, such as a quick, structured check-in at your weekly meetings.
This is exactly what ProjectConnect does. It relieves individual employees from the emotional labor of initiating relationships. You don’t have to hope connection happens organically, because you can build it, predictably.
What About You? Please share your responses in the comments—I love hearing from you!
Are you usually the initiator, or are you more likely to wait for others to take the first step?
What would it mean for your workplace if your organization owned connection — instead of leaving it to individuals?
The friendship may be lopsided if one party is doing most of the work!