This Year’s Strategic Relationships: Do You Have What You Need?
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Welcome to 2022! This year – as in every previous year – relationships will be absolutely critical to the success of your team, your projects, your program, and your individual role. Over the past two decades, the most influential security and privacy executives I worked with were masterful at building, nurturing, and leveraging relationships.
Many of us have spent the past few months planning for the coming year and documenting the objectives and outcomes we want to achieve this year. I bet fewer folks spent time considering the specific people whose support, approval, or adoption we need to meet those goals. Yet, the trust and influence we earn from the people around us–whether it’s our boss, business partners, customers, or team members–will determine the direction, scope, and impact of our efforts. Relationships need to be discussed during planning and execution.
Hot, warm, or cold
A simple exercise for strategic relationship management is to list the individuals critical to your short-term goals. If your success depends on a group or community of people, identify the decision-makers who influence or direct the behavior of other group members. I find it helpful to create a matrix of important relationships and conduct a periodic review of each by determining if they’re hot, warm, or cold.
Hot - individuals in hot relationships trust you, can easily forgive honest mistakes, and routinely articulate that they share your goals. When relationships are hot, you can turn to them when you’re in a pinch or accurately expect that they’ll advocate on your behalf in rooms you're not in.
Warm - a cordial, respectful relationship that still requires repeated persuasion and negotiating to gather support.
Cold - these relationships are non-existent, stale, or hostile. If you haven’t connected before or in a long time, even previously hot and warm relationships can become cold and unpredictable.
In boss mode, you can expand those considerations to include long term aspirations, positioning, and trajectory of an entire organization, program, business unit, or company. If you know where you want to be in the next few years, it’s important to build the necessary relationships now, before you need to call on them.
Most professional relationships I’ve come across fall in the category of warm. There’s nothing particularly wrong with them except that they require ongoing and consistent effort to prevent them from turning cold. On the other hand, many cold relationships could easily become warm with even just a small amount of attention and sincerity.
Additionally, it’s common that for some important security and privacy relationships, such as customers or regulators, there may be someone else at your company responsible for managing those relationships. Specialization and familiarity are helpful in engaging with certain individuals. Normally, this is completely fine and it’s not worth fighting over ownership so long as the work is done well; but if these relationships are critical to your success, you need to contribute to their success by supporting and collaborating with your colleagues to build and nurture each relationship. This also means that those individuals responsible for the organizational relationships that matter to you are also priority relationships for you to care for.
3 tips for managing relationships
Relationships need time and attention. Don’t expect dramatic results overnight. That’s not how genuine and reliable trust is built. Rather, start early and think about what you can do to make the relationship truly beneficial for both parties.
Meet other people where they are. Use the language of your intended audience. This requires listening and paying attention to the cues around you. Don’t ever assume your expertise is the most important.
Manage expectations honestly. Be upfront about limitations and opportunities. When people don’t get what they expect from you, it hurts your credibility in those relationships.
Add value by understanding what other people want and need. Leave out the “optics” and “smoke and mirror” tricks you learned from unscrupulous leaders, and build your own reputation for delivering ethical win-win solutions. “Help me understand,” is a disarming and productive request.
