Racing To The Top With Relationship Capital Leadership 🚴⭐️🥇🏆
It’s July which means the Tour de France is taking place. The diverse conditions in which the cyclists and their teams work together is ripe with lessons for leadership and sustaining high performance. Today, the days of business behavior being separate and distinct from personal behavior are over.
In our hyperconnected, transparent, and morally interdependent world, everything is personal. Every individual is capable of relationship capital leadership! Where there are leaders, there are followers, and with these interactions comes responsibility. Leadership today is much less about position in the hierarchy and much more about influence. You don’t have to be a manager to be considered a leader of your capability in your functional area.
Effective relationship capital leaders lead from the front. They are role models and mentors. Relationship Capital leaders teach more than they tell, and they share their knowledge and expertise without stockpiling information. Relationship Capital leaders stand in front of their teams and demonstrate the organization’s purpose and values with their actions.
Relationship Capital Leaders Are Transformative To Their Companies
A Relationship Capital Leader asks questions that can lead to mutual collaboration and support decision-making. They are curious life-long learners. They want to know more and seek out new information. They challenge the status quo and ensure the organization’s staff have the necessary tools to achieve their performance objectives. This can help nurture managers who are more like leadership coaches that autocratic supervisors. Relationship Capital leaders create more leaders.
Active and consistent role modeling is important to a business. Followership can be put at risk if the team sees their leader behave in an inconsistent manner. When not all the information is not revealed, perceptions can cause employees to make false judgments that propel rumor and gossip. The staff that has limited experience and understanding with leadership tends to lower their trust. The team looks to both their formal and informal leaders with relationship capital for direction, as well as a sense of safe neutral ground, to share their knowledge, experiences, ideas and ambitions.
Leveraging the Team Meeting
Relationship Capital Leaders get out from behind their desks and participate in team meetings can counteract this effect. These team meetings can be scheduled or on an impromptu basis. The team responds well to sharing their insights on how they choose to perform their responsibilities. Leaders that attend team meetings creates a culture of support so staff can demonstrate the commitment they have in their work. It also gives them the opportunity to communicate their challenges and roadblocks. Relationship Capital Leaders can break down the organizational hierarchy and functional silos by empowering staff to elevate their performance for themselves and their team
The team meeting provides opportunities to demonstrate how the “walk is talked” in your area. Relationship Capital leaders demonstrate support and encourage their leading staff to do what they may already know and are sometimes reluctant to attempt. Visiting your team and peers creates mutual understanding, earns positive interactions or relationship capital, and establishes team standards. Appropriate social behaviors can be displayed that build goodwill, and true knowledge can be learned. After team meetings, Relationship Capital Leaders can “boast” about the important knowledge gained, communicate the positive news, and continue to enable their co-workers success. This creates a virtuous cycle of even greater support, growth, and communication in all directions.
Our goal is to assist leaders and for-profit B2B organizations in implementing a culture of high proactive trustworthiness by assessing, capturing, measuring, and utilizing its greatest asset; Relationship Capital (RC). If building a culture of high trust or proactive trustworthiness is strategic to competing in the global hyper-connected and transparent marketplace of today, it must start with the leaders at the top, demonstrated on a daily basis, and measured so as to attract and sustain high performance.
A business case is being made for a more tangible and open “store of value” for these assets of high performance; purpose, values/guiding principles, credibility, reputation, and influence. For too long, individuals and organizations have had no operational process for capturing the value of relationship capital from a financial perspective. Every consulting firm has their own perspective on the problem and the measurement. The global relationship economy is becoming more horizontal or Peer to Peer (P2P) in its interactions and all stakeholders are requiring more openness and transparency.
Why Influence is Important to Leadership Today
Before learning how a good leader equipped with influence can create great change in an organization, let’s take a closer look at what influence really is. The term influence is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force. The definition suggests that the genuine meaning of influence is to get people to take action without any sort of force or exertion.
As a leader, you practice influence. By staying genuine to its core meaning, you can really make a difference. Influence is an essential leadership quality that gives you the ability to move just one individual or a large group. You can use your influence to launch a new initiative, make strategic decisions, and create change in your organization. Influential leaders perform what others believe to be important.
Leaders across the world proclaim that high trust relationships are a strategic asset. When asking a CEO of one the largest private banks in the United States how he measured this relationship asset, he did not have an answer. There are no current operational accounting measures of Relationship Capital (RC) on the balance sheet. And therein lies the rub. How can leaders design, shape, and operate a high-performance culture without this intangible asset being measured? Business leaders require open standards of relationship capital in order to guide their progress.
As a leader, professional/entrepreneur, organizational unit, or product/service, your:
- Relationship Capital (RC) will become as important as revenue, income, and cash flow.
- RC will validate your credibility, reputation and influence.
- Relationship Capital (RC) will provide a Key Performance Indicator to attract opportunities to you.
- Relationship Capital (RC) process will be the self-governance model of high-performing groups.
Relationship Capital (RC) has always been a key-performance indicator of high performing leadership. The challenge has been that this intangible asset is based on the values, perceptions, and behaviors of the individual & group, of which behavior is the only observable element.
Whether you are an executive leader of a global corporation, an entrepreneur, or a business professional, you compete in a global marketplace. The rapid deployment of mobile devices, cloud infrastructure platforms, and big data analytics technologies creates an environment that will transform the competitive landscape across whole industries. Add open standards for capturing and measuring what has been an intangible asset and you can foresee a business world that competes on high proactive trustworthiness or Relationship Capital (RC). Outcompeting by out behaving [i]the competition.
The speed at which a product or service innovation can be created, sold, and implemented through these global digital channels is mind numbing. The ability to earn and maintain trust by capturing Relationship Capital (RC) is as important as any other forms of capital (financial, intellectual, human, etc.).
As we visualize the future, it is important to see where we have been. We have moved from an agrarian society thru the industrial age to the information age over the last 100 years. Now, through the explosion of social media channels, we have entered the “Relationship Capital Economy” where establishing and growing a trustable reputation or “RC” with you entire ecosystem of customers, employees, and partners, will be the new currency or even gold standard for success.
Crossing The Chasm
The chasm between the current state of leadership abilities and the future need is even more revealing in high-tech disciplines where students and young professionals are committed to learning the high-velocity of foundational information that comes at them, in an effort to stay current with the fast-changing times. If successful in their principle positions, these same individuals are promoted to higher levels of responsibility without even being provided with the basics of leadership.
The maturation of leadership capabilities begin in the classroom, but they are more appreciated when demonstrated through visible behavior. Business organizations should create a vision including core competencies of leadership to be mastered. Relationship Capital Leaders make and deliver on their commitments by following the guiding principles of honesty, accountability responsibility, support, respect, and trustworthiness. Maybe your organization has different guiding principles?
The challenge today is clear. Young professionals and those in technical fields should pursue and take part in courses, projects, and extra-curricular activities that strengthen their relationship capital leadership capabilities. Corporate and team leaders must appreciate that their future depends on the leadership acumen of their young professionals.
The core of the argument is the direct comparison of relationship capital leadership ability versus management expertise. A reasonable statement could be made that the difference between management and leadership is very small. You would apply leadership or management principles based on the circumstances A counterargument is the belief that if leadership or management ability are not taught and developed, they cannot be leveraged for organizational transformation and success. There exists today a new relationship capital paradigm, one that is partial to emphasizing leadership over traditional command & control management. Leadership and management are interdependent; they interoperate for the success of the business.
Conclusion
Earning a credible reputation today is a race to the top with standards of behavior that inspire greater trust, commitment, and innovation from the team, company and all key stakeholders. How we connect, collaborate, engender trust, deepen loyalty, keep promises and earn relationship capital is the source for sustaining distinction today.
www.StandardofTrust.com
Sources:
- [i] Seidman, Dov (2011–09–19). How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything
- http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Trust-Leadership-Transforming-Relationship-ebook/dp/B00IK1T6Z6
- https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/leading-front/
- Originally Published on May 28th, 2015 on Linkedin
