Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see it as a place you go to give, and not a place you go to take.

—ANTHONY ROBBINS

How do you view the people you lead? How do you form relationships? What unique contributions do you make to relationships? Your responses to questions like these are the basis of the relationships you have today and those you will build in the future. They reveal what you stand for and define the reputation—your leadership brand—that you bring into every conversation. To the extent that your reputation is authentic and you are faithful to it, you create connection and alignment with those around you. Your brand is the platform on which you build relationships with others.

Sam, the CEO of a training company, spent several hours a week reaching out to others in five- to ten-minute phone conversations that were as varied as the people he called. He asked great questions and ended each call with an agreement to speak again during the next few months. Sam rarely asked the person for anything during the calls, yet took careful notes about what he learned. At the time, the other executives in the firm wondered why he spent so much time making such calls when there were so many challenges to be dealt with.

Yet precisely because of these calls, whenever the company faced a major issue or opportunity, Sam was able to reach into his contacts list and find the name of a person who would help. Whenever the company needed to hire a key employee or contact a potential new customer, supplier, or investor, his call was taken by the person who could fill the need. Sam’s brand was that he could always secure resources for the people in his organization and would also help people in other organizations obtain what they needed. They were eager to take his calls and looked forward to having conversations with him. When making these calls, he operated in a leadership mindset.

Essential Relationship-Building Skills

As you move into positions with increasing responsibility, you will need more and deeper relationships. In addition to internal relationships, you must develop an ever-widening circle of relationships with customers, suppliers, competitors, industry leaders, financiers, and professional advisers. Collectively, these people are called stakeholders—they affect your success and are affected by your performance.

Figure 6.1 summarizes the relationship-building skills required at each rung on the leadership ladder, along with the perception of relationships typical at that level. As you move into the upper leadership levels, your technical skills—what you know—become less important. What counts is whom you know and, perhaps more important, who knows and trusts you. Top leaders usually have the broadest and deepest relationships and, ideally, will teach you how to form and strengthen yours.

FIGURE 6.1. Relationship-Building Skills.

As you climb the leadership ladder, your relationship skills deepen and your perception of relationships broadens.

Stakeholders are essential to achieving your goals. Your job is to identify and build relationships with them. Find personal ways to connect and create alignment. One CEO of a Fortune 500 company was known for writing notes—over twenty thousand in one year—to virtually every fellow traveler, employee, customer, and supplier he met while visiting his company’s facilities. Each note acknowledged what he had learned, expressed appreciation, or asked for more information. He wrote them in the car on the way to and from the airport and while waiting for flights. His assistant took the letters and mailed them the next day for maximum impact. The longer he continued this practice, the more that people reached out to him during his travels and the more strategic information he was given—just by connecting in this personal way. His brand was one of listening and responding, of caring and connecting with others.

Multimedia Relationships

Communication has always been a keystone skill in relationships, but now we are all having conversations with more people, more often, through more media than ever before. In this digital age, conversations are multimedia interactions that include emails, blogs, instant messaging, texts, tweets, videoconferencing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, among many others, in addition to face-to-face meetings and old-fashioned phone calls.

Electronic conversations efficiently deliver facts and figures, yet they convey little, if any, emotion. They are easily misunderstood and can become grenades that explode in the receiver’s inbox rather than tools that strengthen relationships. Unfortunately, when some people receive a grenade email, their first instinct is to lob one back. “I can’t believe he said that and copied our boss. I’ll set the record straight so he won’t mess with me again.” This response initiates an email battle when the goal should be to build relationships. Emails can erect walls when you should be building bridges.

Another unfortunate trend we see today is for people to email or IM a coworker rather than walk down the hall to have a conversation. Even worse, they copy others on the email, many of whom feel compelled to respond. Consciously or unconsciously, these individuals avoid the personal interactions that make conversations work. Then they are surprised when a message is misinterpreted or people are not aligned behind a key strategy. The real problem is that they have not held conversations that build relationships. Without question, we support using multimedia communications to open doors, schedule appointments, and reach out to those you cannot meet face-to-face. But they are not a panacea for resolving issues, nor do they replace the synchronous conversations that solve real problems and create real opportunities.

Ineffective communications create narrow relationships, which produce ill-advised decisions and uncoordinated actions that yield poor results. Conversely, great conversations follow the same path but in a virtuous cycle, one that substantially increases the potential for extraordinary results. Many executives work in a virtual environment today and have limited opportunities for face-to-face conversations. If you are one of them, the phone or Skype provides additional richness in the conversations (if you pay attention to inflections, tonality, pauses, and the pace of the conversation in addition to the words) and enable you to receive the unspoken as well as the spoken messages.

The Increasing Importance of Relationships

The way you relate to others evolves as you grow from individual contributor to manager, and again from manager to leader. Often the promotion to first-line manager is given as a reward for superior technical skills or the willingness to work long hours. Relationship-building skills may be secondary. If you think back on your promotion from individual contributor to first-line manager, you may recall being tempted to use the same skills that made you successful in the past. But in the new position, you realized that your performance was measured not by your actions but by your team’s results. As a neophyte manager, you learned to build and strengthen relationships with your direct reports to complete assigned work. You only succeeded when your team succeeded. In some cases, your direct reports may have been your peers prior to the promotion. So you were challenged not just to build but to change the nature of these relationships. Similarly, if you are a manager of managers, your performance is defined by how well your managers perform and the collective results they produce.

Leadership positions require deeper relationships and broader conversations than management positions. Furthermore, being a good manager far from guarantees that you have the skill to succeed as a leader. Upon taking a leadership position, your scope expands; your decisions are of greater consequence; and their implementation depends as much on evoking trust, respect, and passion as on your people’s skills. You must deal with a wider circle of stakeholders and surround yourself with thought leaders, because tomorrow’s opportunities will grow from today’s conversations.

Figure 6.2 illustrates the progression from targeted to trusted relationships in your life as an executive. The process begins by identifying people who could contribute to your current and future success—targeted relationships. After finding opportunities to meet them, you develop and nurture a tentative relationship. When you get to know and trust each other, the relationship becomes an asset for both of you—a transactional relationship. The process culminates when you hold intimate conversations about issues and opportunities without a personal agenda. Such trusted relationships are critical to success at the highest levels.

FIGURE 6.2. The Progression of Relationships.

Relationships enable you to benefit from high-level opportunities—but they take time and focus to develop.

Not Having a Relationship Can Be Costly

No matter how many relationships you have, you always need more. Furthermore, as we noted earlier, when a relationship is needed but does not exist, it is usually too late to form it. One CEO described the relationships he wished he had built. As a senior executive in a Fortune 100 firm, he was regularly invited to join the company’s lobbyists on Capitol Hill to meet the congressional committee members who set policies in his industry. He declined the invitations, saying that he had more important work to do.

Instead, he focused on building relationships with the financial institutions, large customers, industry peers, and key employees who were critical to his current success. He consistently produced impressive growth through these relationships. He told us, “When I visited our facilities, I would see individuals working at their stations and have lunch with them. I would get to know them on a personal level, share information to build trust, and let them know I cared. It wasn’t a trick—the trick was that I really cared, and they felt it and responded.”

However, declining those congressional visits was something he regretted a few years later as the CEO of a government services firm. While he focused internally, a crisis exploded when a government agency tried to debar his company from working with federal agencies, based on untrue allegations. The CEO, angered and alarmed, called his congressmen and asked for help. The requests fell on sympathetic but deaf ears because he had not previously developed relationships with them. After lengthy negotiations, the CEO agreed to leave his position as part of the settlement with the government to reinstate the company. This CEO hit a speed bump in his career, not because he did not value and build relationships, but because this talented relationship builder did not reach wide enough. He had built relationships for expected events, but not for the unexpected. Fortunately for this executive, within a year, he became CEO of another company primarily through the industry relationships he had built.