Relationships -- The Sum Total of Any Business

As a manager in The Middle, what is the most crucial element you must deal with every day?

Some would reply, "Money." Others might say, "Products." Still others, "Strategies," "Business models," "Organizational plans," or "The corporate vision."

All of these may be important. All are tools you need to understand and learn how to wield in pursuit of your goals and the goals of the company. But more important than any of these tools are the people you work with and your relationships with them.

After all, to the extent that you've been entrusted with business tools -- money, products, services, strategies, and all the rest -- it's because of what you've done with and for the other people in the organization. Something in the way you communicate, the way you collaborate to solve problems, the way you listen and learn, the way you direct and coach, the way you disagree constructively, the way you channel your enthusiasm -- something in all these personal traits has convinced the top brass that you have what it takes to manage. And managing is all about motivating the people around you to work together for the common good.

So "people skills" are not the "soft stuff" of management, something to be given lip service but ultimately less important than the "hard stuff" like financial analysis, marketing strategy, or corporate law. People skills are the heart of management, without which everything else is so much sound and fury.

It's deeply ironic that, while we in business carefully count our money, our output, our customers, and just about everything else we touch, we fail to measure what matters most -- our relationships. Sure, we amass contacts in our Outlooks or Blackberries or Treos, but do we really evaluate the relationships they represent? Do we analyze where we stand with them? Do we devote resources of time and energy to improving them?

Ignited managers study their relationships the way astronomers study the stars in the sky. At any given moment, some are bright, while some are dimming. Some are moving out of alignment, while others are moving in. Periodically a star may self-destruct in the awesome phenomenon known as a supernova. Other times a new star emerges, one that may ultimately play a central role in your system.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to chart the relationships that make up your business universe. You'll explore how to understand their relative importance, measure your progress with them, and discover ways to improve and strengthen them. This simple system will help you identify where your challenges are and decide where to focus your energies. You'll learn how to visualize the strengths and weaknesses of your relationship network and, as you apply the lessons in this book, you'll be able to see the difference as those relationships improve.

Map Your Universe in Five Easy Steps

The following exercise, which we call the Manager's Universe, has many uses. It can be used to map the network of key relationships involved in your routine, day-to-day business life. It can also be used for more specific purposes. For example, suppose you're asked to join an interdepartmental team to help launch an important new product. You might want to create a Manager's Universe map specifically tailored to this project, one that you can use to analyze the relationships that will influence its success or failure.



Excerpted from 'Ignited: Managers Light Up Your Company and Career' by Vince Thompson. Copyright© 2007 by Vince Thompson. Excerpted by permission of Financial Times Press, an imprint of Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.