Let me tell the story. I was looking for someone to lead a developmental exercise for me and my team on developing and sustaining strategic relationships. Someone in my network recommended David Nour to me, I hired him, and he took us through four months of content and coaching on the very subject -- with his book, Relationship Economics, as kind of the textbook we would be following.
I had two crucial epiphanies on this journey.
The first came when Nour brought to us the concept of the pivotal contact.
Certain individuals can help accelerate your ability to achieve your goals -- not just meet your goals, because many people can get there by themselves, but truly accelerate your achievement of them. For example, on your own, it might take you six months to reach the chief executive officer (CEO) of Company X to offer your suggestions on how to accelerate revenue growth in Asia-Pacific. Alternatively, the chief financial officer (CFO) of that same company could personally walk you into the CEO’s office in less than two weeks. That is accelerated access, and it can be obtained by knowing the right people, or those whom we call pivotal contacts.
And the epiphany? As staff working for an association, our job was to BE a pivotal contact for each and every one of our members. When they are looking for help on accelerating progress towards their goals, they should view us as a contact within their network that can do exactly that. In some ways, being their pivotal contact is the most important thing we can do.
The other epiphany came when Nour was describing the strategic use of what he calls “relationship currency,” specifically, making “deposits” into a “relationship bank.”
The following graphic does not appear in my edition of Relationship Economics, but Nour did present it to us, and it certainly captures the process the book describes.
Your Relationship Bank is essentially your network -- the people you can connect with on a regular basis if you so choose -- and Relationship Currency Deposits are those interactions, strategic or otherwise. Those deposits can help you leverage your network to get to the pivotal contacts that can help accelerate progress on your goals, but the really important insight here is to work backwards against the arrow shown in the diagram.
In other words, don’t start by making deposits. Start by identifying your Relationship Centric Goal (goals you simply cannot achieve alone and must develop and nurture critical relationships to attain), then by identifying the Pivotal Contacts that can help you achieve them, then make the deposits with the people in your bank who can help you connect with those pivotal contacts.
That tightly summarizes a strategic process that can help you not just reinforce and build relationships, but reinforce and build THE relationships that will help you achieve your goals.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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