Coach a peer at your same management level with no hierarchical authority — the challenge here is separating friendship from neutrality, not authority from support.

Prepare 10 deep questions before any coffee chat — converts pleasantries to relationship.

Create sheet of your 100 key relationships, last contact, next planned.

After hearing your partner, reflect back three sentences: content, feeling, and underlying value.

Apologize with: name the act, the impact, take ownership, repair step. No "sorry if...".

Each day, tell one person about a specific act they did or a precise quality — no "you are great".

Trade six escalating-depth questions with a close person to deepen intimacy in 30 minutes.

Invest five minutes to say a foreign colleague's name correctly — the highest return per minute in workplace relationships.

A magic question to thaw cold collegiality: "Tell me about [event/food/custom] in your culture".

90 days into contract: review with vendor — don't wait for renewal to find issues.

Don't ask AI "write in author X's style". That = using their commercial style sans permission.