Slapper straps
With the sheer speed of change in this business world we are being forced to make new meaningful relationships with people we don’t even know. And at the same time, we need to make decisions about other people that we are not so confident about.
And because this state is so immediate – I mean how many people reading this, have a pile or several piles of business cards in their office that have been more or less processed? – we need some way of trying to sort potential and actual relationships out.
When I was eight there was a school assembly where the headmaster told a story amounting to “You can’t tell a sausage by its skin” and the moral in the story is absolutely right, but then how do you tell a sausage? Well I reckon that one good way is to watch what people do, rather than pay too much attention to what they say.
We know a business couple from some consultancy work that I have been doing. They are about our age and the senior partner in the practice is well known both locally and nationally. He writes a lot, Chairs a professional body, speaks at conventions and so on. After having met socially a couple of times and noticing how much we appeared to have in common, I suggested they come and stay one weekend. We could do the mountain walks, Hay on Wye bookshops and various other local delights. They sounded pleased and we gave them a couple of dates, three months hence. After a month, I emailed to see if they had decided which weekend to take. They were still “sorting their diaries”. Another month went by and we hadn’t heard anything. With just a couple of weeks left before the first option date we had heard nothing. So we assumed..................well what do you assume?
I think the moral of this story is that we are all finding it difficult to build relationships under pressure. You’ll win some and you’ll lose some too.
Labels: difficult for all of us, speed relationship making and breaking
posted by Tim @ 8:25 AM
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