The Course That Nearly Every College and Company Is Missing

No matter your chosen career or industry, there’s one course you should have taken by now, but I’m virtually certain you have not. The reason I’m so certain is because it’s almost non-existent: Building Strategic Relationships.

For the vast majority of us, the strength of your relationships determines the strength and success of your career. It also determines your happiness and even, many researchers argue, your longevity.

But we all leave it to chance. We stumble through connecting with others, and we tend to be far more focused on tasks than relationships. This is largely because, when it comes to building strategic relationships, most of us are novices.

I’ve long argued that relationships have a quantifiable value and that each of us should utilize a systematic process for identifying, building, nurturing, and leveraging personal and professional relationships. Doing this well takes training and skill building; very few of us are born with this innate knowledge.

There's a lot of advice out there that's incredibly simplistic: get business cards and give them out… write thank you notes… and so on. It’s not nearly enough.

Most networking fails because there's no purpose, there's no goal, there's no plan.

You have to be intentional about why you are building a network. You have to clearly understand who the right fit for you is. You must have a business outcome in mind and be able to discern which relational goals other people have, that you are willing to support.

Then you have to be consistently intentional about nurturing those relationships along a defined continuum. Relationships take time and effort, and you have a limited supply of both. (In response to this undeniable fact, many people allow most of their relationships to wither.) You must have a strategy for investing in your most valuable relationships, or it won’t happen.

My daughter is applying to colleges, and we have been going on a lot of college tours. None of the course curriculums I’ve seen include anything about Building Strategic Relationships.

If you've been in business for more than five minutes, you know that nine times out of ten, your next opportunity comes from the relationships you have built and nurtured. Why would we allow someone to spend four years in college studying how to thrive in the world at large, but fail to teach them how to build strategic relationships?

Can you name any other skill more relevant in every single profession including business, science, technology, medicine and engineering?

You can make the same observation about corporate training programs. Most of them lack any sort of relationship-building depth. To take this a step further, I can envision companies that have (or want) strong cultures to develop a program that is customized to teach all employees: we take relationships seriously, and this is how we build and maintain relationships here.

This is a giant step beyond simply putting your mission, vision and values on your website.

In other words, these are the relationships you need to succeed here. Not just in your function, but across different functions and geographies. The more complex these organizations, the more an employee’s relationships become his or her app, so to speak, to navigate that culture.

I recently delivered a three-day leadership program for a group of global leaders from a single company. At one point, the leaders from one region spoke about these incredibly powerful projects on which they worked six months ago. The CEO asked how many people in the room had heard about them. 10% of the people knew.

These people comprised the most senior level of executives in the company. What that episode revealed, said the CEO, was that everyone is very operationally focused. (That’s no surprise, because that is how they are measured and compensated.)

Learn and teach how to build strong, strategic relationships. It is by far the simplest and most effective way to improve your results and outcomes.