Know Your Relationship
Are you transactional, reciprocal, or personal?
At our little ice bath startup Morozko Forge, we’ve been thinking a great deal about what constitutes our company, and how we relate to all the myriad different people and organizations on which we rely to grow our venture. To help us sort it out, we created a way of thinking about our relationships as belonging to one of three categories: 1) transactional, 2) reciprocal, and 3) personal.
Transactional relationships are those in which the terms are made explicit, and there is little, if any, expectation of continuance. For example, when you are checking out at the grocery store cash register, the cashier might ask “How are you?”
But cashiers aren’t asking you because they have some deep, personal interest in your well-being. Your relationship is transactional, which is to say that you have an explicit understanding of what each of you is expecting from the other.
You are expected to hand over your credit card, and the cashier is expected to process your payment in the correct amount and help bag your groceries.
After that, you’re done with one another.
When we buy supplies, materials, parts, or components online, we typically engage in a transaction in the context of transactional relationship. We…
