THE RELATIONSHIP PARADOX

If strong relationships are critical to leaders and a requirement for their success in an organization, why do so few of them say they actually do anything intentional or systematic toward developing them? Why do I continually hear that "business relationships are difficult"? Sure, it's true that relationships can be difficult, awkward and unpredictable, and they can certainly be challenging to measure. In fact, all of those reasons lead to the opportunity to explore how diversely people view business relationships. In order to do that, please take a few minutes to complete the following sentence:

People like to work with people they ... _____

You might answer along these lines:

* Like

* Trust

* Know

* Respect

* Are challenged by

* View as genuine

* Understand

* Are introduced to

* Believe in

* Care about

* Worked with before

* Have fun with

* Share common goals with

I call these "relational attributes," attributes we attach to people we like to work with. Hopefully, these are also attributes that others value and see in us. We all instinctively know what goes into a great business relationship and many of these relational attributes relate to our personal relationships as well, and data supports it.

A recent study revealed that 89 percent of senior executives across all major functional areas believe that relationships are the key to their success year over year. Yet, the study went on to indicate that only 24 percent actually do anything intentionally about this important element of their success. Remarkably, those 24 percent indicated that they relied on their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to manage their human relationships! Good luck with that.

Do you believe that there's really an R in CRM systems? I find that human beings put the R in CRM systems, so it seems a bit presumptuous to me that these really smart folks are relying on technology to help them accomplish an essential "human calculation." Please think for a minute as to why would they even try to take this shortcut.

The answers are the same.

Business relationships ...

* Are awkward

* Take an investment of time

* Are challenging to measure

* Cannot be prioritized

* Are unpredictable

Whatever your answer was from the above responses, I assure you someone else has had the same hesitation. Other answers I often hear are "I'm not sure which relationships are the right ones"; "I have over five hundred LinkedIn connections and it's hard to tell where I stand with them"; or "I just don't have relationship building in my DNA." The response I am most surprised by is "I'm not sure of the return on my investment in relationships." This is also amusing because it contradicts what was just declared empirically as the critical factor for success. How many company presidents make the bold statement "My company is built on relationships"? In fact, the study went on to indicate that fewer than 5 percent of organizations actually have any specific strategies for helping their professionals develop and strengthen the relationships required to achieve their goals.

So people do acknowledge the importance of business relationships but since they don't easily fit into a spreadsheet, companies and organizations often ignore or lose their true strategic value and create few systems to directly encourage or support them. Relationships are often left to chance and simply occur in ad hoc patterns in what I call "relational ad-libs." Risky business to say the least when so much is at stake. That's why I call this problem the Relationship Paradox.

THE ESSENCE OF iNTENTiON: A RESOLVE TO ACT IN A CERTAIN WAY

The real problem starts with the fact that today's companies are so preoccupied with processes and technology, packing more and more complexity into their people's daily work, but with little intentional focus on how to develop the relationships required to drive performance in this environment. We're all attempting to create relationships instinctively and through technology rather than intentionally. Even machines need humans!

You can see this problem best in the model that every company uses to codify responsibility — the org chart. So let's start at the beginning to see how companies go wrong.

Multiply that three, six, maybe a dozen times with more boss layers, plus a board, and you have figure 1-5, your average midsize company:

The problem is that the charts may show how responsibility flows, but they don't show how actual work flows when humans are involved. That's because you have a relationship with your boss and your report, but to do your job you also have relationships with your colleagues and their reports illustrated by the dotted lines in figure 1-6.

And you have relationships in other divisions: Andy in Production, Annie in Finance, Art in Legal, for example.

Now to pile on even more, think about how the relationship dynamics discussed above are further compounded when we bring people outside of our organizations into our collaborations. Consultants, contractors, partners, government agencies, vendors — they come from different cultures and bring a potentially different set of values and goals, yet are often important to the completion of our projects. For example, strategic alliances usually are accomplished through forming teams from each organization involved, working together to find synergies and incremental added value as a first step toward combining resources and efforts in a more substantive, strategic way.

THE RISE OF AT-WILL RELATIONSHIPS

The above complexity is further exacerbated by what I call At-Will relationships. At-Will relationships are discretionary relationships that are needed to accomplish a business objective. You may have heard the term "at-will employer" or "at-will state," which relates to state employment laws where an employee is more or less hired and employed at...