Lead Where You Are - Cultivating Authentic Relationships
It is incredible to think how developing, cultivating, maintaining, and leveraging personal relationships has dramatically changed just in the last decade. The ease of communicating is replacing the fine art of relating. Our ability to communicate anywhere, anytime is the new norm no matter your generation, gender, work environment or position in life or work. It is easy to lose the art and practice of developing relationships and rely strictly on communicating.
In our upcoming book, Lead Where You Are we explore three key types of business relationships and how we can lead our way back to developing and maintaining impactful connections with others, moving past the “bits and bytes” of communicating to actually building something lasting. We learn that all relationships are not created equal and with little time to devote to cultivating relationships, it is important to recognize the differences and the strengths and the pitfalls of each. And finally, we discuss how to utilize your sphere of influence.
Here’s an excerpt from the Leading Relationships chapter:
PROPERLY INVESTING YOUR TIME
Let’s begin by defining what is a relationship. Depending on which dictionary you grab or website you navigate to, they will all give you something to the tune of “Noun. The way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.” In today’s fast-paced and complex world, the time available to establish and cultivate relationships is near zero. To effectively lead and influence where we are, we must get back to developing and, more importantly, investing in authentic, personal relationships each day. As stated before, not all relationships are created equal, so not every interaction will be an investment in authenticity. However, it is important to develop your personal awareness and skill set for identifying the interactions that require a proactive investment from those which are more transient and transactional in nature and impact. With limited time, and that limited time ever-fleeting, we obviously can’t invest the same time and effort in every relationship. Think back on your interactions with others over the past day, week and month and you will likely see a startling pattern. It is highly likely that 80 percent of your impact and value has come from only 20 percent of the relationships and interactions you engage with in a given timeframe. Yes, that’s correct, only 20 percent of your relationships will account for an overwhelming percentage of your personal impact and effectiveness! We call these our Critical 20. This is precisely why it is so imperative that we know how and where to spend our relationship investment efforts.