The value of understanding and practicing the skill sets of relationship capital ensure you never suffer from being the topic of the book ‘The No Asshole Rule’. Relationship Capital requires us to act and behave in alignment with the Golden Rule. However, if you work in any reasonable sized organisation, or have made a hasty hire, you have undoubtedly crossed the path of those for whom the golden rule is alien.  The office bully, the vicious boss, we all have our personal encounters to tell. In his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One, Stanford Professor Robert Sutton describes the financial implications of jerks in the workplace.  He demonstrates how bullies cost businesses big time with the tale of an employer of a highly compensated salesman in Silicon Valley decided to quantify the costs of his star employee’s bad behaviors. The employer estimated that the cost to the business for one year was $160,000 spent on anger-management training, overtime costs associated with last-minute demands, time spent by HR professionals to mitigate his disasters, not even including the amount of colleagues he siderailed on the way. “In an organization of 1,000 people, the total annual cost of office jerks (TCJ = Total Cost of Jerks) is estimated at $750,000,” says Sutton. Sutton, a management science suggests that we can all be difficult at times, but there are those who seem to make a career out of it. Identifying them isn’t too difficult, handling them is. The fact is those who are obnoxious are difficult to fire as they are often in positions of authority, who somehow have managed to convince the boss that they talented and effective when they are simply bullies. Professor Sutton’s book shows you how to deal with these people in a work environment.

Signs to watch for:

1. Personal insults
2. Invading one’s personal territory
3. Uninvited personal contact
4. Threats and intimidation, both verbal and non-verbal
5. Sarcastic jokes and teasing used as insult delivery systems
6. Withering email flames
7. Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims
8. Public shaming or status degradation rituals
9. Rude interruptions
10. Two-faced attacks
11. Dirty looks
12. Treating people as if they are invisible

Cost to businesses include lost productivity when people talk about the latest incident rather than working, overt or covert sabotaging of systems, processes and strategies, churn resulting in the need to hire, train and recapture lost knowledge. There will also be difficulty in recruiting internal candidates because a manager has developed a bad reputation. Factor in the time spent on complaints and mediation involving HR or the bullies direct report because people don’t want to work with them. Implementing relationship capital as a cultural norm allows people to identify and deal proactively these types far more effectively with peer values that diminish the destructive impact such people impose.

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.

Tough times bring new skill sets in bartering and negotiation. People with strong relationship capital have already laid the ground for exchange as an economic transaction because they have buiilt trust. You can learn how to do this. The Relationship Management Institute offers online training in high level negotiating delivered by an industry expert. It’s all part of the real ‘Relationship Economy’.

I empathise with those who are finding the pressure to adapt to the digital environs an endless and ever demanding requirement to keep abreast of an accelerating world. Never has there been a time when forging Relationship Capital with peers, colleagues and associates has been more relevant or essential. In the current global climate we all need to understand we have to create a personal brand afforded by digital mediums. Building your relationship capital requires a consistency. Here is a checklist for you:

EARN RELATIONSHIP CAPITAL

* Never overlook an opportunity to make a contact.
* Offer help to everyone even when you’re not asked for it.
* Make sure every contact you make requires a follow-up action.
* Initiate communications. Don’t ask people to call you, be proactive.
* Try to talk about the contact, not about yourself. Learn what he or she wants.
* Always look for interconnections among people in your network.
* Make personal introductions between contacts with a common interest.
* Create Relationship Capital Interactions that benefit everyone involved.
* Always stay in the loop when there are more than two people involved in a networking interaction.
* Help build the Relationship Capital of others.
* Be known as an adherent of Relationship Capital Ethics.
* Grow your network continuously.
* Keep track of your networking activities.
* Network daily until you no longer need help from anyone for anything.
* Build Relationship Capital with every encounter.
* And, above all else, always remain visible to your network.

The world is changing more rapidly than we can accomodate and we have a personal obligation to do all that we can to optimise our professional visibility, whether we are currently employed or seeking work. I encourage everyone to take the following test and ensure you are fully up to speed:

The Path 101 Digital Candidate Quiz

1) Google your full name.  Give yourself 2 points for every link on the front page actually about you.

2) Give yourself 10 points for having a blog that you update regularly with something professional (not just pics of your trip to Cancun).

3) Give yourself 2 points for being on LinkedIn, another 5 points for having a profile over 85% complete.  If you have over 150 contacts, give yourself an additional 5 points, but 10 points if you’re over 500.

4) If you are on Twitter, go to your profile page.  Give yourself a point for every Tweet of any kind of professional value on the first page.  Give yourself another 2 points if you link to your blog or LinkedIn in your bio.

5) Check out your Facebook profile.  Give yourself 5 points if you have filled out your employment history.  Subtract 10 points if your profile picture might be deemed “ridiculous”.  Subtract a point for every incriminating thing a friend of yours writes on your wall.  Subtract 20 points altogether if your Facebook profile is public to people in your city or school network and would be seriously damaging to your chances of getting a job if someone looked at your photos.

6) Give yourself an additional 10 points for every niche professional site that you actively participate on that is relevent to your career (like a social network for graphic designers or a stock trading site for those interested in finance).

The first ‘The Relationship Management Institute’ award goes to Zappos for embracing social media to create an open, transparent and collaborative company with blogs, tv and great UI. The website is a testimony to all that can be accomplished with dynamic and interactive media for both customers and staff alike. Zappos is an extraordinary success with a mantra “Build open and honest relationships with communication.”  A winning formula because more than 60% of their customers are returning shoppers. Zappos.com made FORTUNE MAGAZINE’s “100 Best Companies To Work For” list for 2009. FORTUNE puts out this high profile list every year, in at #23 this year, making them the highest ranking newcomer for 2009.

Zappo’s CEO, Tony Hsieh writes on the company blog that ‘building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to build your brand.’

Tony understand that it’s a very different world today, with the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. Whether an unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee, any story can spread like wildfire by email and tools like Twitter.

Zappos have 10 core values that act as a formalized definition of their company culture. The core values weren’t formed by a few people from senior management that sat around in a room at a company offsite. Instead, they invited every employee at Zappos to participate in the process, and here’s the final list we collectively came up with:

1) Deliver WOW Through Service
2) Embrace and Drive Change
3) Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4) Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5) Pursue Growth and Learning
6) Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
9) Be Passionate and Determined
10) Be Humble

Tony declares:’The cool thing about the Zappos core values is that I’ve used them as my own personal values as well. So it makes tweeting really easy for me… Whether I tweet about something personal or something related to Zappos, if I’m living my life through these 10 core values, it all goes towardsbuilding the Zappos brand while shaping me personally as well.’

Employee First, Customer Second (EFCS) is a radical new philosophy of HCL Technologies.
Through this philosophy the aim was to create a unique employee organization, drive an inverted organizational structure, create transparency and accountability within the organization, and encourage a value driven culture. I think this presentation is a similar ethos and lays out how HCL technologies also espouse the same cultural code to positive effect: