The Relationship Edge: The Key to Strategic Influence and Selling Success, Third Edition

Chapter 8. MAP YOUR KEY RELATIONSHIPS

Virtually everyone who has been in business more than a day or two understands that positive business relationships can help them do their jobs. Not everyone understands, however, that the more good relationships you have and the more diverse those relationships are, the more effective you can be at whatever you do.

Most of us take an accidental or serendipitous approach to relationship building. We tend to just let relationships happen. A more effective life and professional approach is to build relationships strategically—not because you want to gain or be successful in life (although that doesn't hurt), but because you want to have a more fulfilling and rewarding life. Again, the quantity and the quality of your relationships in many ways determine the quality of your life.

Take William Dawes and Paul Revere, for example. Each rode from Boston on the night of April 18, 1775, to alert the countryside that the British were coming. Dawes rode south, Revere rode north. As Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap point out in the Harvard Business Review, the towns they traveled through were demographically similar. "Both men came from the same social class and had similar educational backgrounds. But only Revere raised a militia and only Revere's name became famous." What did he have that Dawes did not?

He had a network of diverse relationships! Paul Revere was an information broker, Uzzi and Dunlap say, "a person who occupies a key role in a social network ...