On why it is important to maintain good relationships with people!

This post is an extension of the previous one on networking.

In academia or industry, influential people and talented people are all connected to each other. With this said, it is important to maintain very good relationships with everybody.

I always see people burning bridges with their former employees, grad students cursing professors, employees sending angry letters to companies who rejected them, researchers sending unprofessional emails to editors of scientific journals who trashed their articles, etc...

This is not good! You will realize that the top performers will always maintain a professional behavior. For instance, even if professors do not like each other, they would always be very polite and act with decorum. The top performers know very well that influential people are connected to other influential people, and unprofessional behaviors might "come and bite them in the ass later on"(the American expression for it!).

What I mean is that there might be a situation where you step on the toe of Mr X. Two years later you apply for a job and your hiring manager is Mr Z, who's connected to Mr X via Ms Y. And, you find out that they decline you you dream job, following a call from Mr X! I can cite countless examples like this.

Be always courteous! Try to have good working relationships with your colleagues, advisor, boss and everyone around you. Get genuinely interested in people. There will always be people who have difficult personalities, but you should never lose your cool or do something irrational that you might regret later on. Practice empathy and try to understand difficult people. But always smile and maintain a professional behavior!:)

Along the same lines, be a good Mensch, like Guy Kawasaki would put it!