Committed to Results? Then Create an Equal or Greater Commitment to Relationships

In 1973 Mark Granovetter wrote one of the most widely circulated, and most frequently referenced, papers in the social sciences, The Strength of Weak Ties. To grossly oversimplify, he makes a compelling case for us to rethink our perspectives about relationship and relating. In the process he dispels some myths with compelling research findings.

Originally he was studying how people find jobs. The myth was close friends are your best bet. Not so! Weak ties - friend-of-friends, or even friend-of-friends-of-friends - that's what he discovered about how people actually found their new jobs.

The implications of his insights go way beyond job hunting to discovering everything and anything we want - new insights, great places to vacation, great new customers or vendors... The bottom line, it becomes even clearer to us the importance of relationship and relating. Even more, the possible limitations and opportunities in the different kinds of relationships we have. For example, we are less likely to get new breakthrough insights from our familiars, those close ties, our community, family and close colleagues, those who see the world pretty much as we do. On the other hand, those people we have weak ties with, acquaintances, some employees, customers, vendors, external advisers, casual encounters, and so on, are much more likely to have very different views and insights and are therefore more likely, if given the opportunity, to be the catalysts for breakthrough thinking, new opportunities, and consequent innovative outcomes.

Most executives - this is an accusation I really want you to consider and not casually dismiss - are not very competent and relationship building and day-in-and-day-out relating. Let's be honest we have been trained to be transactional. Most of us did not even know such a phenomenon as EQ existed. Some still don't! My evidence for this assertion, the horrible way people are dealt with in corporations all over the country every day. As a coach and consultant to senior execs I have horror stories you would not believe.

The world is changing - no news flash there. Speed of change is increasing - yea, yea!

What we have not yet grasped, especially in the CSuite, is the importance of relationship and relating - and I don't mean the "so as to" transactional stuff we all do, and are good at, that happens to have people in the mix.

I mean the practice of connecting with people, discovering who they are, what makes them tick, their passions, concerns, commitments. Herb Kelleher was a great businesman and airline exec. But what he is most known for by the people who worked at Soutwest and the who he interacted with is his extraordinary capacity to get to the inards of people - he cared, he was interested, he understood the importance of relationship and relating. My perspective is that Southwest's success has less to do with all their process brilliance and fuel oil futures savvy, and so on, the technical stuff, and more to do with their brilliance and relationship and relating.

How many conversations do you have with your people that have no other agenda but to relate, to get to know them better, to find out what turns them on? In a head to head with the guru of relationship building Keith Ferrazzi would you have your own insights and stories of your prowess in this area? If not, I recommend an urgent crash course in the importance of a rich and diverse network of relationships. Read Never Eat Alone, create some practices and disciplines to build out your network - and remember, because we do forget, everything we accomplish is accomplished through and with other people - our network of relationships - which means the weak ties as much as, if not more so than the strong ties.

What are the questions you don't have an answer for right now?

Summer is over. The holidays are over.

And if we did not get sufficient R&R during our vacations then too bad, because with the ever worsening economy, and the pressures to survive, let alone grow and prosper, mounting, we are being confronted with more and more questions we simply do not have answers for.

The other evening I was talking with an executive who is accountable for the Americas for his global corporation. Here are just a few themes from the conversation: acquisitions and mergers have left us with fewer larger customers who are putting us under huge price and performance pressures; competitors have also merged so we have one big competitor in most markets; and suppliers have merged so we have fewer sources for raw materials and, in any case raw materials have sky rocketed. We have never had these conditions to deal with before. What are we to do to retain customers and win new ones? My people and I have never experienced a business environment like this before. We are struggling trying to work out what to do.

Well one first step is to come clean, give up the pretense we do know what to do, or "should" know what to do. I know, most of us did not get into our leadership positions by announcing we don't know how to deal with the demands of our jobs, or the competitive conditions at hand. Yet the truth is we can't engage everyone in the major challenges confronting most of us today - whether the challenges are inside our organization or outside - if we cannot acknowledge we don't have all the solutions, and we need help.

Here is just one recent example from a pair of executives who were willing to acknowledge they were stumped and needed help. First, a component vendor who needed a price increase to survive, and second his customer who needed a cost reduction for the same reason. Neither knew how to come up with a win-win answer. Their story is standard fare in the best run companies - they identified the problem to solve, with all the conditions that a satisfactory solution needed to have. Then they included a slew of people with different perspectives to help invent a solution - which they did.

I frequently ask leaders to show me the list of their "problems to solve". Problems that they don't have the answers for. Too often I discover they don't have such a list - except scattered around the organization in individual's heads. And those that do have a list don't have it on visible display for all to see. And, they don't have a set of practices or processes to continually engage people in addressing the list and solving their problems.

So here is a simple process:

1. Gather every problem to be solved that needs more than two people to solve it into a master list: a) What's the problem? b) What conditions does a solution need to meet? c) By when to we need the solution?
2. Display the master list, and categorized sub-lists, in an "ops room" - a physical and virtual room - so that everyone can see them
3. Designate a person to be accountable to solve the problem
4. Train the problem-solving accountability holders in networking, ideation, conversation management - real-time and virtual, surfacing and dealing with conflict, ...
5. Create a virtual work space - a wiki or other community board and communication practices and disciplines
6. Build in problem solving space into peoples schedules - inviolate time that nothing will displace
7. Nurture organizational energy, mood and morale - and celebrate wins
8. And remember problems are not to be avoided, they are THE access to innovation and breakthrough, satisfaction and accomplishment.