Did you know you are a social processing engine?
Our brain has tripled in size over the last 2.6 million years. Did you also know that almost all of this growth is attributed to our ability to process interpersonal dynamics? This consists of such things as working in a team, coordinating complex tasks with peers, and feeling empathy. It’s all about things like being good at hunting together, building a village as a group, or even raising kids. Those that did this best survived – as a result you have their genes. Interpersonal management requires tremendous processing power – the more complex our relationships are, the more capabilities we need to compute. You can see this fact all across the animal kingdom. For example, researchers have found that the larger the brain in proportion to the body size, the more likely it is that these animals are actively participating in raising their offspring. Consider birds and mammals versus fish and reptiles. The human is probably in need of processing the most complex relationships and therefore, our brain has been fit to match this need. In a nutshell, it’s not only that you care about your relationships, you are simply built for them. If you resonate with the idea you might as a next step ask yourself “If so how do I use my relationship management skills best?”
What is your relationship objective?
The thing is we probably all have one. Most of us probably only have one in a subconscious way and only few of us actually take the effort of defining it through a cognitive process. For some of us, it is more obvious and direct: “I want to make more money.” For others, it is not as direct but still very clear: “I want to hire great talent to achieve my business goals.” For still others, it might be more personal: “I want to meet great people and make them friends.”
Why bother with a relationship objective?
Your network can only assist you in an optimized way if people in it know what it is that you need. It gets challenging if you don’t even know what that is. In fact everyone you know retains some sort of memory about you. I like to call it mindshare. People will be triggered to think of you anytime they come across something that relates to this memory they have of you. It happens weather you manage it or not. There is an interesting phenomenon that you may have noticed in your own past. If you look back, you may notice that a lot more opportunities of a certain type have come your way if you have recently been very active in that specific area to which these opportunities relate. As an example, you may have had a time when you were extremely active in soccer – playing soccer, watching soccer, and talking about soccer. You may have noticed that, all of a sudden, people started sending you soccer-related pieces of information and opportunities. Perhaps they were sending you articles, inviting you to games, or simply connecting with you about a great victory that has recently been achieved by one of your favorite teams. This happened because you unconsciously conditioned these people in such a way that they matched you with the topic of soccer. This is really how it works!
Mindshare has a quantitative dimension as well as a qualitative one.
- Quantitative is basically how strong your mindshare is or, in other words, how top of mind you are (a very interesting concept, but not the topic of this post).
- The qualitative aspect is what people in your network think when they think about you.
Let’s drill down a little bit on the latter and try to understand it better. It’s not only what they think of you but more importantly, when they think of you. We often think of someone when something triggers it. We receive an impulse that makes us think of that person. This can be as simple as a story, a job we see, some new technology, a person we meet, or an opportunity we come across. If any of these things in one way or another links to a person, the likelihood goes up dramatically that we will think of that person. Subsequently, that person may tell us about it, which allows us to benefit from it. Our relationships will have come through for us.
Exercise:
Let’s try this out. Let’s assume you hear about a great marketing job at a fantastic company. Who do you think of right now? (If this example doesn’t work for you, feel free to come up with any other example that might work.) The key is, in almost any situation, you will think of one person and when you do, ask yourself why? What made you think of that person?
So the question is when do people think of you? Or, better yet, when should people think of you? Whatever the answer to that question, it is most likely your primary relationship objective (or at least, it’s very close).
Your Push-back: But I want people to think of me for many reasons.
True, but costly. The more items you add to the list of things people should think of, the more likely it is that they will not think of you for any of them. The reasons are very simple.
- It will take you much longer to educate people on a list of items than on one specific thing.
- You can hit them only a few times on each item on your list.
- They have a harder time retaining it all, let alone linking you up in a way that they can actually act upon.
What works best is if you have a very clear, singular focus. The less ambiguity you have in your relationship objective, the easier it is for people to link you up with it and therefore, forward you any opportunity they come across. Now you might say, “But we do not live in a black and white world.” I would probably initially come back with, “Yet there is one thing that is most important to you and you should condition your entire network for that thing and that thing only.” However, simply by the nature of who I am, I have to agree that we do not live in a black and white world. Still, you can focus on one specific theme for different clusters of folks with whom you interact.
Let’s assume, for example, that you are Mr. Start-Up Lawyer who specifically enjoys working with start-up, entrepreneurial, high energy people. On top of that, you have two very much loved children of young ages.
- All of your professional contacts: Here your relationship objective is that your contacts should think of you when they come across energetic professionals who are starting a company.
- All of your personal friends (specifically, your school co-parents): Your relationship objective here is for them to think of you when they come across great things to do with kids, since you enjoy spending quality time with yours.
If you are one of these people that have a hard time narrowing it down to a singular focus the, the strategy above might work for you. There is more flexibility, yet your objective is not too confusing to make it impossible for people to think of you at the right time. Try it out!
What do I do once I know my objective?
This is where it gets really simple – you just get the word out. If you can, try to get the word out in a way that feels best for you.
- If you’re big into social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), get it out that way. Do it repetitively and in an edutaining way, leveraging several different perspectives. (Edutaining is the skillful art of combining entertainment with an educational purpose of training your network to learn when to think of you.)
- If you’re not big into social media (yet), then make sure you always get the word out whenever you are interacting with people in one way or another. Here specifically, it is useful when you are meeting people one-on-one. I would highly recommend that you make it a standard component of every interaction you have
Let’s assume you are that start-up lawyer, and you are now meeting a business contact for coffee. The primary purpose is business development. One thing you can incorporate into almost any of these types of meetings is a sentence like this:
“I enjoy most helping getting companies off the ground in the right way. My favorite thing is meeting bright, energetic entrepreneurs who set out to change the world.”
What you’re doing here is conditioning that person to understand in a very visual way, what you are interested in and therefore when to think of you. By saying this simple sentence, you increase the likelihood for this individual to think of you when he or she comes across the type of person that you’ve described. That is specifically true for the short period after you’ve had the meeting. If you’ve been in business for a while, you may have a few examples where you’ve had that type of opportunity delivered to you when you’ve talked about it to someone.
So let’s sum it up.
9 steps to defining your relationship objective:
- Know that you already have one – you just have to find it.
- As you do, define it as what is most important to you.
- Be as focused as humanly possible.
- If you need more than one relationship objective, utilize different clusters of people but still make sure that every person you interact with hears about only one objective.
- Train people with every interaction on your relationship objective.
- Stay very genuine about it. Do not let this become transactional. Do not engage in a way that doesn’t feel right to you. In relationships, this rarely works.
- Make that message as visual as possible – it will become stickier that way.
- Be consistent and repetitive with that message.
- Re-evaluate your relationship objective on a regular basis to see if what you are chasing is still true for you.
Resources
Download the Relationship Objective Worksheet
