Tony Adam just wrote a great post about the quality of your business relationships on his awesome blog. I’ve been thinking all day about his words and I can’t emphasize how much I agree. I think we have the same goal here: to help people realize the power of Social Capital. It’s definitely not about collecting fans.
Relationships have a capacity for action
Tony makes a key distinction between contacts and relationships. Contact are just contacts. Relationships have the capacity for action.
The problem here is that there are people that don’t understand there is big difference between someone that is a contact vs. someone that you have established a relationship with and the value of that relationship.
This is a point a lot of inexperienced people miss. The way I see it is like this. If I sit at home by myself and do nothing, I have very little capacity for action. If I go to a networking event and get a bunch of contacts, I have increased my possibilities but still have no real ability to act. It’s like going to a strip joint. I can look but I can’t touch.
Somehow, I have to filter through my contacts to find the people I’m “simpatico” with so I can turn those contacts into relationships. This process isn’t magic and it isn’t as hard as it seems.
Proper culling from contact to relationship
Tony makes a perspicacious point about “burning bridges.”
…there is a group of people that are all about ego stroking and popularity contests, it is an inevitable fact of life. With that comes interesting attempts at leveraging “Social Capital” or “Trading up” without the care of burning a bridge. I’ve run into this many times in my career where I have either been used for access to the relationships I have created, to provide knowledge to the individual, or in a partnership to create opportunity.
Fundamentally, I take no issue with anything he said. I only wish to point out the necessity of a proper culling when you move from the “contact” phase to a “relationship” phase. I don’t attempt to create a relationship with every single contact I make. I don’t have that kind of time, and if the relationship turns out to be worth less than the time I have to invest to create and maintain it, I risk the possibility of offending the other party and “burning a bridge.” By culling properly, I minimize this possibility by ensuring the people who I am trying to develop relationships with are people I want to keep in my life.
They don’t have to be my best friend and I may not ever go have a beer with them, but you can be sure that if they need a favor, I will do everything in my power to make it happen.
Simple Reality #3:
The best way to get a favor is to do a favor
Mothers used to tell their daughters, “You can love a rich man as easily as you can love a poor one.” For our conversation, you can just as easily be friends with a capable person as an incapable one. But, we’re not kids anymore and most relationships (especially ones that develop around work) have some basis in utility. I know that professionally I can make a lot of “friends” because savvy people tend to see me as capable. People with limited time for friendship tend to pick friends who can also be useful. Because of this reality, the single easiest way to create a useful relationship is be useful yourself. This is what Craig’s talking about in his post from Monday, “Golden Advice for Using LinkedIn: Help People.” Do things for other people without worrying what you’ll get in return in the short run.
There’s nothing wrong with creating a relationship for access as long as you maintain that relationship after you’ve gained that access. “Trading up” will do irreparable damage to your Social Capital. You’ll be seen as an opportunist - a social climber. But maintain the relationship and you’ll grow your Social Capital exponentially. Be useful to the second party and you’ll even add to the Social Capital of the person who made the introduction. The more Social Capital you amass, the more valuable you become to your relationships as well.
I’ll get into the process of turning “contacts” into useful “relationships” in future posts. It’s not a matter of personality. It based on a methodology that anybody can adopt and customize to suit their own style.
Bitches, gripes, smart remarks? Send ‘em.
20. February 2009 by Richard Chen
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