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Finding Those Special Someones Takes Time, Effort

By Theresa Minton-Eversole

NEW ORLEANS—Knowledgeable people know a lot of facts and possess a lot of information, but the most successful and prosperous ones also know a lot of people. They identify, build, nurture and leverage relationships to get things done.

It’s called networking, right? Wrong, said David Nour, a consultant who helped kick off the 2007 Society for Human Resource Management’s Staffing Management Conference here on April 23. It’s called relationship economics.

“This isn’t speed dating,” said Nour, managing partner of the Atlanta-based consultancy The Nour Group Inc. “Building relationships takes time, effort and investment. Give me two equally talented individuals, and I’ll bet that the one who’s most successful will be so because of the breadth and depth of their relationships. What is the strategic value of your business relationships, and what part of your day couldn’t benefit from stronger relationships?”

But Nour said society’s sense of community is eroding and people are becoming more disconnected from one another.

“[Most] of the world builds relationships first from which they do business,” said Nour, who was born in Iran but now considers himself an American. “Unfortunately, Americans are so focused on the business that if and only if the business part works, we’ll think about building relationships. There’s a disconnect in our ability to engage people who don’t look like us, sound like us or come from the same culture.”

Relationship Building = Professional Net Worth

“A lot of us think of networking as a necessary evil,” said Nour, who contrasted the concept with that of relationships, which represent deliberate choices to interact with trusted individuals for mutually beneficial reasons.

“People deal with who they like and trust,” Nour said. “If you don’t give people a chance to get to know you, how do you expect them to trust you? Relationship building is a learned behavior, and you have the opportunity to build relationships every minute of every day. By creating a process [for building relationships], we can accelerate this learning as well as manage the outcomes.”

Nour said that over time people—as individuals, teams and organizations—promise value. As that value is delivered, they start to exchange relationship currency. “It’s liquid; like cash, it has immediate value, but it also has a shelf life because people may or may not remember what you did for them six, nine or 12 months ago,” Nour said.

As that value is recognized, people start to accumulate something called reputation capital, which is comparable—compare your reputation to someone else’s. Over time, the sum of all this becomes a person’s professional net worth. “Which relationships do you perceive as assets and which are perceived as liabilities?” Nour asked.

There are five areas where relationships can be not only quantified but also leveraged to help get things done:

• Business development.
• Leadership development.• Innovation/best practices.

• Strategy/execution.

• Large-scale change/mergers and acquisitions.

“A relationship-centric culture is unafraid of retribution or failure,” Nour explained. “Noah’s Ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by professionals. How often do we over-complicate things? Link strategic direction to personal action. Think, ‘What do I need to do? What do we need to do? What do we want to be? What’s important to us, and why do we exist?’ ”

Also, he added, think about return on investment in terms of return on influence, involvement, integration and image. What’s more, he suggested that attendees do strategic relationship planning—placing a value on each relationship and cultivating it to increase one’s influence.

“Every relationship you have is a portal to a whole different set of relationships you never had before,” said Nour, but these relationships will have different values to you. “Diversity is the biggest asset to your relationship portfolio. You keep hanging out with the same people, that’s as far as you’re going to go.”

Nour encouraged attendees to accumulate more relationship capital and build their professional net worth by taking 10 simple steps:

• Succinctly identify relationship-centric goals and objectives, including a time frame within which to achieve them.
• Clean up the Outlook calendar!
• Use technology to keep in touch/engaged.
• Rate the value of current relationships and relationships still needed.• Schedule five coffee meetings.

• Send out five personal handwritten notes.

• Really get to know five of your colleagues.

• Schedule a dinner party.

• Become or find a mentor.

• Invest in one relationship each week.

“Nothing will ever trump performance,” said Nour, “but relationships are a very close second. If you can influence the conversation, you influence the relationship. If you influence the relationship, you can influence the outcome of it.”

Tags: business relationships, Leadership Development, collaborate, relationship currency, trust centered relationship, Professional Net Worth, social networking, business networking, Reputation Capital, Keynote Speaker