Relationship capital

This week I’m outlining a situation we dealt with earlier this week, and its impact on our business

Relationships are paramount…

After a break over Xmas and a holiday, I’m delighted to be back. I’m writing this in my kitchen, waiting on my kids getting home from their grandparents, and I’ve been thinking about a situation we encountered earlier this week. 

Last year, we started using a new service based on a tech solution, with some AI and some people involvement. It’s a brilliant concept, and massively improves the workflow and client experience within my busy financial advice practice. 

A lot of it is automated; we complete forms, things get done in the background and the outsourced work happens quickly and efficiently… until it doesn’t. At that point, a person gets involved. 

This usually happens where something is a little out of the ordinary, and in my professional world, this often leads to confusion, particularly where administrators are generally earlier in their career and have less experience. I have no issue with this, especially since I was early in my career once, and I’ve made as many daft mistakes as anyone. Nothing is insurmountable, as long as there is ownership and humility. 

I’ve written recently about both of these, and my belief that they are absolutes; you cannot excel without having both of these skills to some extent. 

We deal with a person, let’s call him Dave (sorry to the Dave’s out there), who is the manager of the team that handles our workflow. He doesn’t have either of these skills, in any way. The problem we had with our work was a fairly simple thing, and a call or message from Dave to say ‘really sorry, we messed this up, I’ll keep a closer eye on this in future’ would have been all I needed to know we were fine and to keep our relationship in a solid position. We didn’t get either- instead we got defensive Dave, who was more interested in trying find examples of where we had messed up and showing them to us. 

As easy as it is to say ‘don’t be like Dave,’ my ask is this. When was the last time you were under a bit of pressure, and tried to deflect blame or attention elsewhere? Or thought that it was someone else’s fault while biting your tongue in the meeting? 

Unless you can say with humility “I accept what you’ve brought to my attention shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did,” or words to that effect, you aren’t taking ownership. It might feel like it, but as a leader you are accountable for the problem, the mistake, whether it was directly you, or not. This is a blessing; without ownership you wouldn’t be in a position to solve it or do differently next time. 

I need to have a conversation with Dave now to address this, which takes a chunk out of the relationship capital we’ve built up over time. That’s OK- we can rebuild it, and in fact the discussion may even enhance it, depending how the conversation goes. 

Relationship capital is crucial to getting things done over time. It’s not the immediate impact of blaming someone else, it’s what it does to the relationship between the people involved, and the relationships of those who see it happen. Nothing will bring conflict into a relationship faster than blaming the other person for something that’s obviously your fault. 

So our conversation has to happen. And honestly, that conversation will go a long way to whether we continue using that solution. If we can’t resolve the small stuff, like an admin error where something was recorded incorrectly, what chance will we have when something serious blows up? 

I’ll be back next week. Please forward this to a friend, and help this story reach someone it could help. I’m also keen to hear from you- what challenges do you have, or would you like me to write about? Reply to this email and I’ll make it happen. 

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