Understanding the power of a quality relationship management depends a good deal on an awareness of people’s behaviour and preferences. Soliciting from any group, community or department, what motivates, inspires and provides satisfying experiences is key to creating strong bonds and powerful alliances that drive buy in and support, no matter the context.

Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

Going into business with friends has a very poor track record. Frequently, both are lost. It doesn’t have to be that way if you all conduct yourselves as if you were working with any business commitment. Moving from informal to formal is a skill that good relationships can accommodate when everyone understands that there are different rules and boundaries affecting the status of personal and professional interactions. Both states of engagement, formal and informal, can blend and even forge stronger ties when the ability to articulate, compromise and discuss ideas and options are adopted in a balanced and constructive way. These are skills that are powerful attributes for success in both social and professional settings which these are covered in one of our core training modules.

This is a short, sharp reminder that when working with friends in a business situation, move from the informal to the formal, create clear boundaries, commitments and psychological contracts that you would do elsewhere if you seek to succeed in business.

As Donald Trump says ‘ It’s not personal, it’s just business’.

In the wake of the recent revelations of UK politicians financial expenses abuses, provoked the last straw for the british populace. The continuous erosion of public trust met the usual swathe of promises, assurances which only demurred into a flagrant ignoring of public opinion finally diminished the last vestige of respect. The people now demand full accountability, even for what could be, in perspective, minor conflagrations. The widespread ire is compounded in further transparently obvious favouritism of who is encouraged to fall on their sword and who is conferred leniency.

This episode has brought into sharp clarity the need for full transparency and accountantability from politicians, who are, in fact, public servants, drawing very adequate salaries, backed up with substantial pensions. It is the opinion of the Relationship Capital Institute that politicans need to bring a new level of responsible governance that forges a renewed trust, for without it, both they and the public suffer crises that stymies positive recovery in a time of considerable recession and all suffer.

I suggest that they set up a department that educates politicians on what it is to create relationship capital and how the bedrock of values that resources the building of such a necessary quality will renew and restore the peoples trust.

Paul Kearns is Director of PWL a specialist, strategic HR, learning and performance measurement consultancy which he founded in 1991.

After extensive research into HR’s impact on organisational effectiveness he developed a whole system, strategic approach to maximising the value of human capital through HR strategy. In particular he has been in great demand to put a value on intangibles and his work in this area has led to him becoming a world authority in this highly specialised area with a long list of satisfied clients in the UK, mainland Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. He was a member of the UK CIPD’s working party on Human Capital.

A highly original thinker, he has brought to the HR world a blend of strategic vision and operational pragmatism. He is the author of the recently published and highly acclaimed ‘The Value Motive’ which goes a long way in clarifying the confusing concept of ‘value’ and shows how it can be used to transform thinking and action in organizations. The video outlines his approach to human capital:

Who hasn’t? Most people pull a ‘sickie’ now and again, but we don’t feel like declaring ‘I just don’t feel like work today’ on the basis that such a revelation would ensure you never go to work again, not at that job anyway. Apparently, the amount of lying we actually do is quite substantial as revealed in this article. How does that play with our integrity?

Lies, Trust and Chocolate ~ The New Social Business