
How To Build Resilient Ongoing Partnerships
As a professional or solopreneur, you are either building relationship capital with your relationships or not. Effective social networking is imperative for sustaining success today. However, it can be a challenge determining who to collaborate with; especially early in the relationship. In a digital and social business world where it is relatively easy to connect with another. Making progress today requires smarter collaboration and tools to achieve your objectives.
INTERACTION STYLES — GIVING, TAKING, AND MATCHING
Dr. Adam Grant, a Ph.D. professor at Wharton is the author of the book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. The first interaction style is known as the takers, they’re the individuals who are attempting to get as much as possible from others and do not want to give back in return. The givers, on the other hand, are unique individuals who enjoy contributing and assisting others, and they often do so without expecting anything in return.
So what Dr. Grant really got into was asking in Give and Take:
- What do those successful givers do, that takers and matchers could learn?
- What differentiates the givers at the top from the givers at the bottom?
Most people fall in the middle of this give and take continuum, and are called matchers. These individuals try to maintain an even balance of giving and receiving. If you help me, I help you and vice versa. The principal questions that the book answers: Which group is most often at the top of the success metrics and Which group is most often at the bottom?
The research shows that the givers are at the bottom most often. That across sales, engineering medicine, as well as many other industries, people who are helping others without expecting anything in return, are often setting themselves up for being exploited as well as early burnout or extreme exhaustion by the takers. Many people assume that since the matchers are not as selfish as the takers and are not as selfless as the givers, that they must be at the most successful. This is not the case.
The interesting discovery made is that at the top of their success metrics, the best salespeople, the most productive engineers, and the most effective doctors are also givers. So givers are over-represented at both the top and the bottom of success metrics.
It’s so good to have the opportunity to help others who have helped you. It’s not about “tit for tat,” it’s about “I love you, too.” ― Karen E. Quinones Miller
So what Dr. Grant really got into was asking:
- What do those successful givers do, that takers and matchers could learn?
- What differentiates the givers at the top from the givers at the bottom?
Here is an Adam Grant Interview on Getting Things Done In Conversation Program with David Allen
David: I have had an ongoing conversation for several years where I’ve always run the basic working hypothesis that there’s a great accountant in the sky, and so, if you gave and in some way just serve, that somehow there is an accountant who’s keeping score somewhere, and I actually don’t have to bother about keeping score. I just figure it’s being kept score. And I’ve also heard other people who’ve been around folks that at the pretty top level of the corporate game, big money, big deals, big egos — whatever, and they informed me because they had actually grown up in a household like that. Their dad had been one of those titans and he said, “Dad never really put words on it, but there was something that he watched called The Point Game. The Point Game was you just kept giving away as much as you could, as much as you could and wait as long as you can to call in your points, because then when you call in your points, you get biggies. Kind of a bit of a Mafioso approach that too, understood.
And so both of those dynamics have been going on in my mind, at least from a spiritual (with a small “s”), from a spiritual standpoint, if you could just keep giving, keep giving and never cash in your points, then you cash in your points perhaps somewhere else, or your points got cashed in just by the quality of life you were living by doing that. So those have been resident thoughts inside of me because, by the way, your book has 30 or 40 pages of references. So this like based on lots of research. This is not just, “Hey, good idea, let’s just formulate this.” That’s fascinating Adam, to see how much validation that you came up with teasing this thing apart. So, let me toss it back to you.
Adam: Yeah, I think it’s an incredibly interesting dynamic and I think David what you just articulated, some might call, “a matchers theory of why givers succeed”, which is, they have this giant accounts receivable that they can call in at any point. What I found especially interesting as I started to study and interview and to, in some cases, follow successful givers around was, a lot of them never called in those favors. And just like you were describing, they found that actually a lot of people were quite willing to help them out without even having to ask. And I think this goes back to the idea if you think about what a matcher is.
David: It’s fascinating to me, I’ll take this to another level that I’d like you to react to, which is the people that I know that are real givers, that — they attract me wanting to give to them. It’s almost like because there’s a magnification process by doing that. In other words, if I give to them, then I’m giving to the giving process itself and maybe there’s a form of matching in that as well, but from what I’ve seen, when you meet some of those people that just walk around with that kind of attractiveness, very deep sense of attractiveness, people just want to be around them because they have that kind of energy. I think people like giving into that simply because you get a chance to experience some of that, at least vicariously, that freedom or that integrity yourself.
Adam: I think that’s right on target, and yeah, I’ve been intrigued by a couple of these dynamics, one being, of course, that the givers tend to attract fellow givers into their networks and so, the fact that you’re drawn to these people suggest that you might already be a giver. But then they also to nudge people, especially the matchers in their network, more towards this sort of giving without any strings attached orientation and you know, I think again one of the interesting ways they do this is when you look at some really successful givers and I found a bunch of these that are in the book, basically what they end up doing is often refusing to let matchers pay them back. And the next best thing for a matcher then is to pay it forward and help somebody else. And you can sort of feel like there’s some cosmic karma in that. And in the mind of a giver, that’s a great way to sort of invest in creating a network in which everybody is operating by this norm, which, by the way, makes it a lot safer to be a giver; right?
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.” -Albert Schweitzer
At a deep level, many of us are attracted to givers who practice this standard of trust leadership style. I think much of that comes from the fact that when we look at our core values in life, there is some influential research by Shalom Schwartz and his colleagues, going on Worldwide, where they actually show that altruism, which is a value of protecting and promoting the well being of others, is the single most important value to the majority of people in the world’s cultures.
If everybody in your social network followed a guiding principle to be proactively generous to you, you would not have to concern yourself so much about shielding yourself against the takers. Not all of us bring this guiding principle to our businesses, but when givers do and they’re able to achieve high performance. Also, givers are very inspiring and that attracts opportunity to them and their business teams and social networks.
“It is in the practicing of giving we learn, grow, and expand our perspectives, which proves that real achievements come out of giving.” –Senora Roy
Augment Your Credibility With Peer SaaS
Making and fulfilling commitments has always been an important indicator of entrepreneurial or professional success way before today’s hyperconnected and transparent world.
Imagine you are a professional at a business networking event and you open an app on your mobile phone and you could see an individual’s trustability as measured by industry standards of Relationship Capital or “RC”. Now imagine someone else overlaying their Relationship Capital (RC) app on you? How would you fair? Would your Relationship Capital score be “green”, “yellow”, or “red”.

Capturing Relationship Capital (RC)
The Standard of Trust offers Peer SaaS©, p2p commitment management and recognition web app. All you need to do is have your connection register on the platform and you can begin to earn relationship capital points, appreciation badges, and achievement level trophies in your organization and across your ecosystem.

Capturing Relationship Capital (RC) is a Social Reward in Business
To provide stakeholders such as clients or customers and within the organization and the ability to capture Relationship Capital (RC) in their social business interactions fills the void, which has been the lack of social reward. People from multiple generations generate and share free content and thought-leadership on social media and receive likes, retweets, comments, etc. The gamification of commitment and accountability with open standards is a natural progression or step forward in online social recognition.

Measuring Relationship Capital (RC)
There are a number of ways to display the RC you have earned (credited) through kept-commitment and RC that has been lost or debited. You could have a simple color code of GREEN for RC being earned and RED for RC being lost.
“We plan. We develop. We deliver. We assess and evaluate the results of the assessment. We revise, deliver the revised material, and assess and evaluate again. Perfection is always just out of reach, but continually striving for perfection contributes to keeping both our instruction fresh and our interest in teaching piqued.” -E.S. Grassian
The Credibility Reliability Index (CRI)
Credibility Reliability Index (CRI) is a measurement that was developed as part of the PE-ER platform to establish a basis for understanding trust and focus on being trustworthy. The basic premise is, the more commitments you successfully keep the more reliable you will be and hence more trustworthy.
Therefore, it’s really quite simple. The higher the Credibility Reliability Index score, the more reliable the individual or company is to deliver on their commitments- the lower the score, the less reliable they are.
As a guideline, the Credibility Reliability Index figure is calculated as a combination of:
- The number of commitments you met or exceeded on the timeline,
- The number of commitments that you missed delivery on,
- The total number of points available for commitments requested
- The feedback scores received on all completed commitments
So it’s not simply a case of recording how many commitments you make — it’s much more comprehensive than that and the data is constantly updated.

The Relationship Capital (RC) Interaction Process is a Standard of Acknowledgment
Even your most purpose-based relationships need to be acknowledged. Capturing their kept-commitments earns RC. Accounting for Relationship Capital through peer reviews and recognition only reinforces the culture of respect you have for them along with financial rewards and other recognition programs you have already in place.
- RC is about sharing your made & kept commitments with others and having others share their perceptions of your proactive trustworthiness by crediting or debiting your account with Relationship Capital (RC).
- It is less about Hierarchy. An RC Interaction is most effective as a peer-to-peer process between people from such key stakeholders such as buyers, sellers, suppliers, and partners.
- The key stakeholders mentioned above are members of an “ecosystem”.
- Earning RC is a reward for building making & keeping commitments and building positive goodwill and collaboration is the metaphor and not war.
- The RC process can be hyper-connected and hyper-transparent. It is your decision how to implement it with your business model.
- Having your ecosystem teammates passionate about consistently earning RC with each other in their interactions provides a powerful force for greater engagement and innovation.
- The principles and process for earning Relationship Capital (RC) provide a platform that integrates purpose, principles, and profit that is a competitive advantage to those firms that do not build strong high trust relationships.
- The social reward of Relationship Capital (RC) is a person’s or team’s credibility in action supported by time-tested principles that the professional community agrees to follow.

Conclusion
To enable a solopreneur, for example, to be a social business, requires authenticity. Trusted people talk the talk and walk the talk with their relationships especially in this digital world.
Up to now, it has been safer for business executives, professionals, and solopreneurs not to participate in social media with their stakeholders because of the perception that it was riskier to say something or share something that would anger a client, partner, etc.
It is now becoming riskier for professionals not to engage online with their social network and stakeholders. “No” online engagement means you are invisible which could have a negative effect on your reputation, credibility, and influence. Stephen M.R. Covey, says, “Relationship trust is all about behavior … consistent behavior.”[ii] This is important on or offline. Success today is about influence more than autocratic power.
There are two sides of trust to consider for success today. Whether you are a CEO or average employee of a for-profit business, it is about earning relationship capital with your stakeholders and building interlocking partnerships
Having a reputation for trustworthiness and credibility has always been important for professionals and businesses since commerce began. In this transparent world of business that is emerging through the combination of industry standards, big data, and artificial intelligence; we will be able to capture and measure our most valuable asset which is #relationshipcapital. Now is the time to build more resilient relationships by declaring commitments and following through on Peer SaaS.
www.StandardofTrust.com
Sources:
- http://www.worldbank.org/en/events/2015/03/06/poverty-applied-micro-seminar-series-paola-giuliano
- http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Trust-Leadership-Transforming-Relationship-ebook/dp/B00IK1T6Z6
- [i] David Allen Company©
- [ii] (From: “The Speed of Trust.” Today, years after publishing, it’s still #2 in Business-Life, Ethics, on Amazon.)
