Guide To Building Relationship Currency.
Relationship currency.
People recommend people they like and trust.
What is ‘relationship currency’?
Relationship currency is the sum of impressions someone has about your abilities.
When someone holds you and your capabilities in high regard they are more likely to advocate for you when you’re not in the room.
They are in a sense, spending their ‘credibility’ to back you and your abilities to people in their network.
Relationship currency vs performance currency.
Relationship currency is based on how well someone believes they know you.
Performance currency is how competent someone believes you are.
When you have high performance currency you’re given more work.
When you have high relationship currency you’re given more opportunities.
People recommend people they like and trust.
If someone believes they know you, they trust you, and they genuinely are fond of you and or want you to succeed, they’ll advocate for you. This is called spending their ‘relationship currency’.
At work, how well someone speaks about you from personal experience, when you’re not in the room, influences the opportunities made available to you.
Why does this matter?
At a high level it’s already assumed you’re good at your job (performance currency).
To get more complex deals done, you need another lever. You need a way to get someone who doesn’t know you well to be willing to advocate for you, when you’re not in the room.
Equally, you need a way for someone to have positive intent when they get a request from you. Building your relationship currency and credibility is one way you can do that.
Sometimes workplaces will refer to this as ‘influencing’.
If you’re in a high profile position or are at a level where you’re hearing you need to work on influencing others, building your relationship currency is one way you can tactically do that.
Those with high relationship currency are able to achieve greater things.
By having a relationship with all the people who impact their work, they understand what they need to do to add value to the people they’re working with.
The end result is that those with high relationship currency are more able to move mountains and the people they’ve worked with feel they’ve received value.
Your ‘weak tie’ networks have exposure to valuable opportunities.
Social scientists have discovered that those we know loosely, and interact with less often than close friends or family, have access to jobs, opportunities and gigs we aren’t aware of.
They call this group ‘weak ties’. Weak ties are people we see less often but are more influential on our future career prospects.
The reason they’re so influential is because they have exposure to people we don’t know.
It’s not that we need deep, intimate connections with weak ties. They just need to know the value we offer and how it benefits them to know us.
Something to think about today is, not who do I know, but who needs to know me?
Carla Harris, Vice Chairman of Wealth Management and Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley.
What would they need to know or have, to see what I have to offer, as valuable?
And based on that, what could be a low time intensive way of doing that in my own unique style?
What is your relationship currency like?
To figure out what your currency is, write down:
Every person who influences your career. (Eg. your boss, your client, your client's boss, your boss's boss).
How strong is that personal connection? (E.g. 1/10 - low, 10/10 - high).
Then, for each person listed, write down:
What is their top priority right now?
What is the most valuable thing you could do that would make their life easier?
If you don’t know the answers to 3-4, that’s the place to start.
As in, once you know the answers to that for every single person who influences your career, you can add value to their working life.
If you know the answers to 3-4, go one step further:
Whose opinion matters to that person?
What’s your relationship like with that person?
If you’re good from 1-6, it’s likely you have a high relationship currency. Your job is to continue to nurture it by figuring out:
What is meaningful, according to that person? (Eg. quality time, a trusted confidant, someone they can just laugh with).
What can you do to make sure you contribute to that, consistently?
Different audiences or stakeholders have different needs.
Knowing what each of your ‘audiences’ need, then delivering that, is how you build your relationship currency.
At a certain level, it’s assumed you’re smart.
People have to understand what you do and the right people have to want to spend their relationship currency on you.
To influence that, you need to have a relationship with them.
If you have high standards, others with the same will find out soon enough. And, if you work on your relationship currency, your reputation will spread the word for you.
What if you don’t have any performance or relationship currency?
The 3P’s (profile, perception, power networks) are a way of ‘reverse engineering’ how you’d like others to experience your performance and relationship currency. We teach this in our personal brand workshops in workplaces.
By deciding ahead of time how you’d like to be perceived, for what and by who, you’re able to essentially map out how to help people see that.
Here are examples of 3P’s at work…
Profile: what do I want to be known for?
I want to be seen as a confident public speaker. To do that I can get to know a mentor who’s great at public speaking and ask them for tips so I can show people what I can do.
I want to be seen as the ‘go to person’ for managing complex relationships. I can work on making sure I have an understanding of each stakeholder’s key priorities.
I want people to know I’m the numbers person. I can make sure I can quantify the value of all my stakeholders’ projects by calculating their impact and sharing it with them.
Perception: how do I want to be perceived?
I want to be seen as professional, reliable and positive. To do that, I can work on adding value in meetings, being a succinct communicator.
I want to be seen as someone who has credible understanding in this area of expertise. I can work on making sure stakeholders know I can add value to their projects by outlining a one pager on what that could look like.
I want to be considered for the executive position in future. As a result I can work on my public speaking skills.
Power networks: who needs to know me?
I want people in the executive team to know I’m a reliable source of information. I can start to build a sincere relationship with two board members as a start to learn what they most prioritise right now.
I want people in our customer service team to trust the marketing team. I can start to interview people in the team to better understand their day to day experiences, to better empathise with their workflow and how it connects to marketing.
I want the CEO to see me as a trusted source. I can share regular updates with them, including links to articles, by summarising why it’s relevant to what they have in mind to build a trusted relationship with them.
What might your 3P’s might look like?
High calibre people call their network to get recommendations.
And as one concierge for the world's richest puts it, “My philosophy is that the entire world and everything in it is gated by a human”. The same is true of work relationships.
At this level, having relationship currency with everyone who influences your job is non-negotiable.
Map out your relationship currency in a live workshop.
Did you know we map out your relationship currency in workshops for emerging and established leaders?
For emerging leaders, we bring awareness to building both their performance and relationship currency. They start to see who their stakeholders are and why it’s useful to build a relationship.
Established leaders are invited to reflect on their 3P’s and make a plan to build cross departmental relationships, sometimes across industries, government and media too.
Get in touch today to bring this to your workplace.