Leading Relationships – Not All Relationships are Created Equal

We began our journey to relationship success in our last Destination: Success blog with the action step of identifying your personal sphere of influence. Our second action step to leading your relationships is to define and prioritize your identified connections.  

If you missed our initial blog in this series and have not identified your sphere of influence, no worries,  you can download the exercise here. If you have completed your sphere exercise from last week go ahead and download this week's document as well as you will copy and paste from last week's connection inventory to continue to build it out.

Nearly all our connections fall into one of three types of relationships. Transient, transactional and authentic. Some connections may vacillate between two or more, but for the most part will fall predominantly in one of the three.  You can find complete relationship descriptions by clicking here to assist in your assessment process.  

With your completed sphere of influence in front of you, first identify and highlight top 20% of your connections that produce 80% of value in your daily/weekly/monthly work efforts that lead to both your near and long-term success. These are the critical connections worth investing the greater share of your relationship development time.

Now, quickly assess the type of relationship each of your identified connections are, whether they are in your critical 20% or not. The spreadsheet provides a quick drop down action menu for each connection to assist you in this. Which connections are transient, transactional, or authentic? This is a very important step since not all relationships are equal in impact, so your time invested should be commensurate to the return on that relationship investment.  At this point, you should have a list of all your connections with either transient, transactional, or authentic listed beside each one. In addition, you should have a clear picture of your key 20% critical connections that we will develop specific relationship strategies around.

In next week's blog, in this Leading Relationships series, we will look at your completed work to date and develop a relationship plan that cultivates, leverages, and maintains the appropriate level of focus on all of your current connections.  We are on our way to building a foundation for connection and relationship success.

Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.