This is the third blog in the Growth Acceleration blog series on advancing AI Relationship Intelligence (RI). The second blog discussed various sciences of relational capital, ranging from the science of social networks, the science of collaboration, and the science of knowledge management that fuels person-to-person interconnections and results in a growth economy.
This third blog in the five-part series focuses on what is at the core of the science of relational capital and discusses its importance for directors and CEOs to accelerate their understanding of relational capital.
From my point of view, there is nothing more imperative for an executive than to ensure that their organizational culture is a trust factory.
Social network
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Relational capital is linked to the science theory of social capital and is primarily related to the strength of the attributes and qualities of personal relationships. The roots of this science lie in these leadership behaviors: honoring commitments, exhibiting social norms (emotional intelligence), respecting colleagues, valuing inclusion and diversity, and demonstrating integrity in all interactions.
I refer to these leadership behaviors as a dimension of synergy, meaning that the more relevant the social connections, the stronger the trust-building exchanges.
A good example of this is the election of board directors who may have diverse skill sets for governance, i.e. finance vs. cybersecurity. Yet on the other hand, these board directors may have a lot in common like: industry relevance, geographic relevance, social relevance (valuing the arts, music, sports, foodies). These common dimensions increase the building of trust, as avenues of communication are formed to have conversations that go beyond the task at hand. Humans are social creatures and therefore when selecting board directors there is an incredible responsibility to ensure that the recruitment of board directors is taken very seriously as you are not only looking for the synergy of skills to moving a business forward, you must also take into account collective synergy to optimize human performance. There’s nothing worse than recruiting your first female board director and all the men are planning after their summer board meeting, a golf outing and the new female director doesn’t play golf, and they tell her, okay, she can play golf. better and accompany her. us. This happens more often than we’re likely to talk about, and it affects trust synergy.
From a senior executive’s point of view, building trust is the most powerful corporate DNA to seed, cultivate and sustain.
Trust the strands of DNA in a connected world
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The operating conditions of corporate culture will determine the quality of how trust flows or blocks, just like the strands of molecular DNA. The stronger they are, the deeper the bonding agents are.
Trust needs to be measured more, and just like we constantly measure profit and loss, there is often no trust scorecard monitored in boardrooms on a monthly basis. If you know of a company, I would love to know?
We are starting to see the rise of measurement of mental health and mood correlated to business productivity, and I think we will start to see more creative approaches to mood health and trusted intelligence integrated with capital methods. relational. It is only a matter of time, before we begin to bring more humanity back into our technological ways to accelerate cultural transformation and ensure our people are empowered and trust is key.
Why is this? This is a great question to ponder.
Some experts such as Francis Fakuyama refer to trust as vital to any form of social interaction or exchange and trustworthiness ‘lubricates social life’
When I did my doctoral studies, my research focused on the strength of collective group behaviors and how social interactions varied between different groups of people, primarily sales and customer service professionals at Xerox. There was a great understanding of how these two groups were using online tools to increase knowledge flows and improve the speed of knowledge transfer.
Xerox customer service professionals love to share online how they solve customer problems and help colleagues solve challenges. Sales professionals often want to find the quickest paths to meeting a customer’s business needs and typically rely on a few trusted key experts who often have the best advice to resolve challenges rather than relying on forums larger collaboration. I also saw this when I was a partner at a top-tier global professional services firm where senior partners always had good control over where the best proposals were that could help promote a sales opportunity. And often those proposals weren’t easily found in the millions of online knowledge sources. In other words, knowing the best people with the best knowledge was essential to operating successfully. Additionally, tribes that worked with trusted tribes stayed together to work on client work, so regardless of formal staffing resource structures where resources may need staffing for billable time, people would use trusted networks. with whom they have worked in the past. So humans, as social creatures, naturally gravitate towards trustworthy tribes with proven synergies.
What does this mean from a governance perspective?
Governance
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What is important to appreciate at the corporate board level is to make sure they know how healthy corporate cultures are in relationship capital, and to appreciate that density of trust is at the core to enable productive cooperation. This is a key foundation in building a productive trust-building factory.
The concept of building trust is closely linked to reciprocity; In other words, the more information or knowledge that is considered valuable to the person or persons receiving the knowledge is exchanged, the value of the exchange will naturally increase and the density of trust will deepen as a result of healthy social exchanges.
Trust is a complex and multifaceted concept and it is increasingly important to ensure that corporate cultures trust their leaders at all levels.
Develop shared norms and understandings that enable team building, sharing of ideas, valuing inclusion and diversity, developing storytelling skills, honoring commitments, impartiality, and leadership based on facts and perspective to cultivate learning-oriented cultures are important skills to cultivate in an organization.
In every purpose-driven organization, clarity of organizational purpose and ensuring relationship capital based on trust, healthy reciprocal exchanges, clear expectations, and responsibilities that support both individual and collective goals are key operating processes. to cultivate and monitor.
This blog explored the importance of relational capital and the importance of measuring trust. Leading companies that understand the value of relationship intelligence and the power of social media, advancing the DNA of data is IntroHive. Your brand is interesting and clear and says: increase revenue, increase relationships. Growth retention.
Who wouldn’t want to buy this message?
It is simple and easy to understand. As we live in our online worlds, having intelligent software to track and analyze all of our social connections in real time gives us rich insight into the strength of our communications with our customers, vendors, and employees. I am very excited to further investigate these areas with my company and soon with IntroHive, using AI methods to guide people to more impactful communications.
I am particularly interested in advancing the Permission to Feel dimension and emotional sciences, as I believe that researchers have not integrated theories of relational capital and emotional sciences deeply enough to improve human performance outcomes.
This is the topic of my fourth blog in this series and it’s called Permission to feel to accelerate the economy of the production of happiness.