We get relationships wrong.

I was speaking with a CIO this week who told me of a vendor they had to terminate a couple years ago. The relationship felt lost after the vendor had been acquired by a larger company. Though the contract with my friend was being serviced, the relationship itself was not being developed or nurtured. The work suffered. My friend and his team no longer felt known.

Since terminating the vendor, my friend entered into agreement with a smaller but more attentive firm. He is very pleased with the results, so much so that, after a couple of years of work together, his company invested in a day-long meeting with the vendor to address and adjust challenges that had arisen between them. 

They did it because a relationship had been built, and it was worth saving and investing in.

We throw the term relationship around in business too loosely for my comfort. Vendors have Customer Relationship Management systems. Clients have Vendor Relationship Management systems.

I understand their role and usefulness; I protest the mindset it can project. Have you ever tried to manage a girlfriend or boyfriend, a spouse or partner? How did that work out with your ex?

I can manage myself in a relationship; I don’t manage the relationship.

The Three Essentials In Business Relationships

You need three experiences in a healthy adult relationship; and it turns out you need them in a healthy business relationship as well. If you understand these, you will be more intentional in what really matters. Fail to nail these, and you will continue to be subject to uncertainty in external and internal relationships that matter most to you.

Attachment

Attachment in relationships describe how you and others bond. And bonding is not just a child/parent dynamic or romantic couple reality. You bond when you come together in agreement.

 There are three attachment styles that affect you in a business context:

1. When you cultivate assured attachment, you are in a relationship in which there is disclosure, honest discussion, mutuality, and partnership to shared ends. 
2. When you encounter anxious attachment styles, one or more people involved are acting guarded, coming across as possessive, non-assertive, withholding, and questioning.
3. When you run up against avoidant attachment, one or more people seem distrusting, dismissive, distant, demanding, or overly independent. 

Attachment styles are not something you manage. You must transform them, working towards assured attachment. 

I wrote a few weeks back about the place of fear, shame and separation as a personal and corporate reality. Anxious and avoidant styles embody the dysfunctional behaviors I addressed. 

You will never experience a healthy, productive, profitable relationship if that relationship is measured by checking the boxes of a management system (for external or internal customers). You have to dig into the issues that prevent your client or employee from full disclosure, honest discussion and mutual problem resolution. They need to know you are for them.

Attunement

Which is where attunement comes in. You are attuned when you are dialed in on the real needs of a situation, not just the needs a company or a person presents.

Attunement relies on two critical skills. 

1. Assessment. An assessment seeks to dig deeper into what is being said by stepping back, taking a fresh look at the situation, and looking for themes that emerge. I like four questions that I learned from business legend Tom Paterson:

• What is right that can be maximized?
• What is weak or wrong that can be improved?
• What is missing that needs to be added?
• What is confusing that must be clarified?

2. Discernment.

• What is the motivation behind the behavior? (And what triggers are present)?
• What do they perceive as value? 
• What is the cost they are willing to invest?

Attentiveness

You are attentive to what you have tuned in to.

But there is a problem. You are expected to deliver outstanding results against overwhelming conditions with underwhelming resources. 

That forces you into a corner of being reactive rather than proactive. Instead of developing relationships, you are managing the problems in a relationship. You settle for intervention rather than cultivate intention.

Intention drives attention.

And attention is all about staying interested. And a person knows you are interested because you ask them about stuff of interest to them.

Questions are the vocabulary of the interested.

The easiest paradigm for questions that I have used is John Whitmore’s GROW:

• What is the goal?
• What is the current reality?
• What are the options?
• Which one will you choose and what will you do next?

After you have helped them identify a desirable outcome, you follow up with the progress and build-up the person.

I’m a bit sensitive about business relationships for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the right language but it fails to communicate the new reality required for it. Two, my mom recently died.

I knew that her death would hit me hard, but I was surprised by the depth of the grief. I am walking through the process. 

I am realizing that a relationship lost that produces no grief may not have been a relationship at all, just a friendly agenda.

I don’t want friendly agendas. I want to operate my business in a way that the people I serve know that I am passionately for them, that I will pursue mutual benefit even if that benefit means I don’t prosper as much as I could, and that the measure of our time together isn’t in the cool thing we accomplished but in the even cooler people we became.

I want happy memories with people I’m in business with. I want them to be positively different because of me, and I want to have taken into myself every gem they have to offer of who they are.

I want love. And, if in all of our conversations about client or employee relationships, we never hear the word love escape from our lips, we got it wrong. I don’t want to get it wrong.

My mom’s death reminds me of a poem I had read called The Legacy. It sounds like something she would say:

If you need to cry, cry for the ones walking beside you.

Put your arms around anyone and give them what you need to give to me.

I want to leave you with something, something better than words or sounds.

Look for me in the people I have known and loved.

And if you cannot live without me, then let me live on in your eyes, your mind and your acts of kindness.

Love does not die, people do.

So when all that is left of me is love. . .

Give me away. . .

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