In today’s globalizing world, relationship capital intelligence is a necessary tool for anyone who deals with employees, customers, partners, competitors, government, and other business players. Fundamentally, that’s everyone.

Building visibility through your professional brand towards a positive, trusted position will facilitates your ability to build quality relationships with more people in your niche markets. The result is an increased number of prospects. The people who achieve this high visibility exhibit certain characteristics and behaviors.  Learning to connect fast with your customers, colleagues, bosses, employees, and strangers will give you a significant competitive edge. It will help you maximize the potential in every relationship, be it personal, business-related, or social. Most of us think of “communicating” as a one-way process. We concentrate on what to say, how to say, and how to communicate it better. But, in our zeal to achieve our goal and get our message across to others, we forget that at the other end of our message is a person who also has needs.

Learning five simple phrases can help you build relationship capital with everyone you interact with:

The five most important words:

“You did a good job.”

The four most important words:

“What is your opinion?”

The three most important words:

“If you please.”

The two most important words:

“Thank you.”

The one most important word:

“We”

It’s easy when you know how.

More specifically,  trust defined as “the willingness of a party (trustor) to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (trustee) based on the expectation that the trustee will perform an action important to the trustor, regardless of the trustor’s ability to monitor or control the trustee.” People can sense how you feel toward them. By having a clear and positive attitude with them means they have a clear and positive attitude about you.

Building Relationships – Your Key Business Skills

A relationship is two people eliciting responses from each other. If you want a change in response, then you must change your own actions.As a business professional, you should ask yourself: “What business am I in?”.

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, strategic advisors who helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms drive radical management, business model and strategic innovation. On a piece he scribed for HBS recently he comments “We cannot organize tomorrow’s businesses – or economy – like yesterday’s.

What do I mean?  Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it’s “creepy” but cool to trick consumers, because it’s profitable.

Is it?

Not a chance – as our research at the Lab notes, the fact is: companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.

True power isn’t the power to manipulate. It’s the power to create. There is a world of difference between the two – that orthodox economics has yet to understand.”

One of the four GE Work-Out’s major goals is to build trust through encouraging employees to speak out critically inside the company about GE and the way they perform their jobs without negative consequences to their careers.Trust-based working relationships are an important source of your sustainable competitive advantage because trust is valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and often nonsubstitutable.  The level of trust a leader is able to garner from his/her employees is contingent upon the employee’s perceptions of the leader’s ability, benevolence, and integrity.

Customers will usually come back if:

Your keep your promises

You are willing to help

You inspire confidence

Your treat customers as individuals

You make it easy for customers to do business with you

All the physical aspects of your product or service give a favorable impression.

Building Relationship Capital is a critical skillset when growing your brand, business and reputation. How you deal with people interpersonally becomes your reputation and your brand. Ergo, reputations are built on trust.

The quality of relating brings significant value to every interpersonal exchange. It’s the feeling you walk away with when you have met or exchanged with another person. The ‘feelgood factor’ or ‘not so much’.  We all do it, tacitly, continuously. A kind word and a smile might be all it takes to change a preconception of someone into a positive opinion. We are highly attuned to every word, nuance, timbre of a conversation. We ‘feel’ peoples intentions or agendas through each word spoken. Taking the time to build quality relationships requires us to invest the effort, the attention, in order to build a network of friends, associates and colleagues that add meaning and richness to a life.

Today, we suffer from bandwidth deficiency in an attempt to cram as much productivity to sustain our livelihoods. Yet, we must endeavour to sustain those meaningful interactions that maintain those relationships that make it all worthwhile. And it can be tough, demanding and we don’t always succeed.

The Relationship Capital Institute wants to help the development, understanding and evolution of building relationships. The one’s that last, whether social or professional. As with all things, the motivation came from the notion that ‘there must be a better way’. We ‘d like to make that journey together with fellow professionals from every discipline, who feel the same.

You can join our dedicated group to discuss topics and themes, as well as meet others who seek clarity around the emergence of relationship capital and associated capitals, human, social, economic and knowledge.