“The moment you partner with somebody, you tap into something you never had access to before. You gain their knowledge, experience, influence, and potential. When you are already achieving at a highly efficient level, you don’t gain a great increase by getting significantly better yourself. You gain it by partnering or connecting with other good people who bring something different to the table. And that makes you better.” John Maxwell, Intentional Living
John Maxwell points to a great truth in this quote. We can only make ourselves exponentially better through partnerships with others.
As we round out a focus on social capital, here are the key people I believe we need to collaborate with in order to build:
1. People who share your values.
John Maxwell goes on in Intentional Living to expand the quote above to say, “…If the partnerships you make are with like-valued people, there is no limit to the difference you can make.” Are you surrounding yourself with people who share your values?
However, being of like values doesn’t mean the people you build with have the same personality, demographics, or even opinions. Quite the contrary. Once values are shared,your social capital expands by capitalizing on differences. Start by playing on the same field for the same purpose, and then make sure you have a winning team by involving:
2. People who complement you. We’ve all got strengths and weaknesses in our skills, talents, and personality. Are you building relationships with people who complement you in your challenge spots? For example, when it comes to skills, one of my challenge spots is HR compliance and law. I don’t like it, so I don’t take time to learn it. You better believe I have a couple of good labor attorneys on speed dial.
3. People who challenge you. I love this quote from Talent Anarchy, “In any group you are either going to have disagreement or dishonesty. Which one would you rather not have?” Make sure there are people around you who will challenge and disagree with you. This is also quite often the person who won’t let you quit.
4. People who the world would label as being able to do nothing for you. One of my favorite thoughts about leadership is to gauge a leader by when he/she first walks into a crowded room or group of people. What does he/she do first? How does he/she treat or seek out the people who the world would tell him/her can do nothing for him/her? Do they look for the most “powerful” person in the room first or do they seek the “outcast”? I’ve watched my dad do this right for years. He usually is the first to approach the most unlikely person in the room that no one else is talking to, and the person who oftentimes appears to be the most different from him.
For more on this, check out: Leaders Notice the Unnoticed
5. The person who you want to be. Who do you admire most? How much time are you spending with them? If you don’t know them personally, why haven’t you made every effort to become a part of their circle and you a part of theirs?
6. The people who are connectors by nature. Everyone has core strengths, and I’m finding more and more, that some people’s core strength is that they are connectors of people (People who have done StrengthsFinder know these people by the key strength of “Connectedness”). They have the social capital game down. They don’t need steps to know how to build it, they just do it naturally. If you don’t know who to call for help, I bet there are one or two people that come to mind that you know you can pick up the phone and call because they know whom you need to call for help. Check in with these connectors regularly because they can connect you to people when you need it, but more importantly, they will connect you to people of like values when you are needed. And that is social capital at is finest.
Who do you need to be connecting with to multiple your significance?
Like this post? You may also like this one from Talent Anarchy: Social Capital HR’s Secret Weapon Party 3
