Measuring (professional) relationships

Investing into relationships through communication

What’s the currency you use to develop and maintain a relationship? In most cases it’s through some form of communication. You invest in your relationships (and thus your network) by communicating with the different members. Meetings, Phone Calls, Email, IM just to name a few reflect the social capital or time you are investing into a certain relationship.

Your social capital or time is limited

How many meetings can you have in a workday? Even if you keep it to those dreadful 30-minute online meetings – you’re unlikely to cram more than 20 of those even into a very busy workday. The reason is as simple as it is obvious – you’re time is limited and thus your social capital. Even if you would like to invest more of your social capital there’s a natural upper bound, since most people have a certain reluctance to take a meeting say at 3 AM in the morning.

Impact not effort is key

Just like if you’re competing in the 100m race at the Olympic games you do not get rewarded for your actual training efforts, but for being the fastest. It might be that you were the person that trained the hardest, but the gold medal is awarded based on the result not on what you actually put into it. It didn’t matter that Usain Bolt had his shoe laces untied at the 2008 world-record shattering gold medal win, what mattered was that he was the first to cross the finish line.

Reaction is key

Agreed the 100m dash at the Olympic Games is easier to measure than the strength of your relationships, but not impossible (after all we did found a company on this premise ;-)). The key is what reaction you elicit. Since a relationship is mutual, if you are developing a relationship you will see communication flowing in both directions.

Enterprise Relationship Management

ERM is based on measuring relationships and aggregating that information for different use cases. From understanding the actual internal relationships and network in an organization to know-how transfer there are many interesting use cases using ERM. The basis always goes back to seeing something new (shining light into a dark place) and then deciding what to do with this new information. Otherwise it’s just mere eye-candy and doesn’t lead to data driven decisions.