What is relationship building?
What is a relationship?
A relationship is a connection between two people. The ‘thing’ connecting people in a relationship is called a “shared objective.” A shared objective is anything that two different people aspire to have happen. Examples of shared objective are:
sharing an asset that two people own or care for, like maintaining a house owned by two people
having a conversation, like understanding what the weather might be like tomorrow
promoting an idea both care about, like commenting on a celebrity’s provocative Instagram post,
sharing a feeling, like two people hoping to have fun on a date,
provoking an action, like a child wanting a parent to hug them,
prospering at a position, like two people working for the same company,
prospering at a place, like two people sitting next to one another at a concert.
Relationships are at the core of everyone’s life and are essential to making any change. You can have many relationships with the same person. The more important a person is to you, the more different objectives you share. It is a major effort to list all the relationships you might have going at any time, and many relationships are fleeting as they only last for the length of a short conversation or the time it takes to comment on an Instagram post.
Fortunately, you only need to pay attention to the relationships that have payoffs you care about or have payoffs that people you care about, care about.
People do not often think of what they do as building and maintaining relationships. When you ask someone, “what relationships do you have?” they usually think only of long-duration relationships such as with a parent or child, or between co-workers, or with close friends. People naively think of their relationship with their best friend as a single mostly static relationship and not as many different dynamic ones. We will soon understand why that is limiting.
Relationship building skills enable you to make all the important relationships in your life more powerful and rewarding and prevent you from naively wrecking relationships that could be mutually beneficial. Clearly, relationships formed for the purpose of starting a company are important and high priority, so this is a critical skill for founders.
As we shall discuss in detail, two people do not always agree on what the results of a shared objective should be. No agreement is necessary for a relationship to form; they form because there is a shared objective, whether anyone likes it or not. The shared objectives and the relationships they define can be cursory and transitory, but they may still be something you care about improving.
You may never talk to the person sitting next to you at a concert, but you share a space with them, and you do care if they just drank a quart of vodka. You also have impactful relationships with a person you only know by their screen name and who lives far away, when they leave inflammatory comments on your Instagram because they do not like your ideas.
You ultimately care about many of your relationships; the question is how much attention and energy to give towards making each one more productive. That’s part of this skill.
Payoffs for achieving a shared objective
Whenever a shared objective is achieved there is some benefit that can be split between the people in the relationship. Each member of the relationship may want or expect to share the benefits differently, such as the financial benefits, or the improvement in social status or being acknowledged as being the person who thinks up the most creative ideas.
There are usually costs that the people in the relationship must invest to potentially achieve the shared objective. The investments in money and time associated with successfully achieving a shared objective also may or may not be equally shared.
There is great insight to be gained from realizing that there are 3—and only 3— types of relationships: cooperative, competing and retreating. It is critical for you to be able to tell them apart.
A cooperative shared objective is one where all parties agree how the benefits and costs associated with achieving the objective will be shared. Cooperative relationships are the most efficient at creating new value or capability. They are also the lowest-risk path to making a change. But they require the largest investment in time and resources. Cooperation requires continuous investment in time and attention to satisfy everyone that they may achieve their agreed upon payoff. These types of relationships have another downside because they often produce mediocre results when shared objectives are agreed upon thru consensus or democratic decision-making.
A competitive shared objective is when one or both parties do not agree how they will share the costs and benefits. Competitive relationships are the most effective at testing which solutions produce the best results. Knowing who runs the fastest or who can create code that uses the least memory requires a competition to determine and validate. However, competitions always destroy value in seeking the shared objective and add considerable risks to both parties achieving their desired payoffs. Competitions are stressful and often unleash uncontrolled emotions. Disagreements in how shared objectives payoffs will be split are often covert; you may not realize you are competing. Manipulations are covert competitions when someone uses emotions to get you to do something disadvantageous. You can imagine the problems covert competitions can cause within a team.
A retreating relationship is formed when either or both parties do not care how the cost or benefits of the achieving the objective will be shared. Retreats enable independence and the refreshing of resources. They can also enable creativity and innovative thinking through the elimination of constraints of having to worry about the expectations of others. Retreating trades the benefits from potentially achieving a payoffs of an existing relationship for potential benefits of future individual actions (which may result in forming other relationships). We all retreat much of the time … daydreaming is a retreat from listening to someone. You will often retreat when sitting next to that stranger at a concert.
You cannot always choose the type of relationship
Competition always supersedes both cooperation and retreat. If someone wants to compete with you and won’t let you retreat, then you have no choice but to compete. Retreat supersedes cooperation. If you want to cooperate but the other person wants to retreat, there is no cooperation. And forcing someone to cooperate doesn’t work. Cooperation only can work when both parties want to cooperate.
Becoming skilled in relationship building
Relationship building skills result in the ability to improve desired outcomes created by people working together. The key is to appropriately formulate combinations of cooperating, competing and retreating shared objectives and payoffs. At its most basic, skilled relationship builders can identify all their shared objectives of all their important relationships. They can also formulate new relationships with others, even strangers, that cooperatively create value, competitively test potential improvements, and enable parties to retreat when they need to reenergize.
The fundamental strategies for improving existing relationship are:
Ensure that all competitive shared objectives create valid performance tests. Every competition should yield a valuable new insight into how to improve the performance of the enterprise without generating uncontrolled emotions.
Shift other competitions into retreat or cooperation by offering to modify the shared objectives and expected payoffs.
Shift some acts of retreat, when the potential benefits are high enough, to cooperation by offering to modify the shared objectives, often by making payoffs more immediate.
Relationship building is a powerful skill to master, and the next two sprints dig deeper into understanding and practicing relationship building skills. The next sprint focuses on communication as the most basic relationship and the one that is most critical to get right.