Relationship Management: The Other Side Of Networking

Networking is a vital ingredient to both personal and business success. Every day of our lives we participate in one type of network or another of our own creation or by someone else. Fellow blogger George Nemeth has been a big advocate of networking bloggers (those who operate weblogs or online web journals) and using the Web, through virtual social networking groups like Ryze, to form new and work within existing networks. Valdis Krebs, the architect of some power social network mapping software, has been using his tools to help companies build markets and other things by understanding and building stronger social networks.

Economic developers use networking as a strategy to make in-roads with businesses and other resources they need to do their jobs. Regional, state, national and international associations exist to facilitate this networking.

There is another side to networking, which has been getting much attention in the business world, called "relationship management." I find that networking is usually not an end in itself, rather it is a step toward extending existing and forming new relationships that coincide with our interests, abilities, goals, and activities. I ran across a wonderful article on relationship management as a formal business strategy. Here is a clip from it:

"Alliances, partnerships, and relationships of all kinds in the business environment, whether with external parties such as suppliers or distributors, or internally with the groups and divisions of the same company, require a repeatable process and discipline to be successful. Partnering concepts are easy to think about, and alliances are even easy to create. But their value only becomes clear upon the implementation of the relationship. And sadly, that is where many companies fail. We have found that those companies who are the best in class in the area of alliance management are those for whom alliance competency is a corporate capability and a business process seen as critical to the company's success." Source: Relationship Management as a Corporate Capability by Larraine Segil

Segil reminds us that it requires follow through and skill to create effective, lasting, and productive relationships. I agree with her assessment, having spent many years as a consultant trying to help organizations develop, reinvent, and strengthen themselves. Relationship management is a new core competency that economic development and other organizations should work at developing. In short, it all begins, and ends, with how we relate to people.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this subject.