What’s The Best Way To Manage Relationship Capital?

Relationship capital is the most underutilized capital that all of us have at our disposal. The best thing about it is that with a little effort and decorum, you can build it quickly and easily. There are different schools of thought about managing relationships which bring to the question: What’s the best way to manage your relationship capital?

What got me thinking about this was after I recently read Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. The last chapter is titled The Art of Being a Mensch. Guy wrote a blog post about what a mensch is as well as his 5 guidelines to follow.

His 5 guidelines are:

1. Help people who cannot help you. A mensch helps people who cannot ever return the favor. He doesn’t care if the recipient is rich, famous, or powerful. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t help rich, famous, or powerful people (indeed, they may need the most help), but you shouldn’t help only rich, famous, and powerful people.
2. Help without the expectation of return. A mensch helps people without the expectation of return–at least in this life. What’s the payoff? Not that there has to be a payoff, but the payoff is the pure satisfaction of helping others. Nothing more, nothing less.
3. Help many people. Menschdom is a numbers game: you should help many people, so you don’t hide your generosity under a bushel. (Of course, not even a mensch can help everyone. To try to do so would mean failing to help anyone.)
4. Do the right thing the right way. A mensch always does the right thing the right way. She would never cop an attitude like, “We’re not as bad as Enron.” There is a bright, clear line between right and wrong, and a mensch never crosses that line.
5. Pay back society. A mensch realizes that he’s blessed. For example, entrepreneurs are blessed with vision and passion plus the ability to recruit, raise money, and change the world. These blessings come with the obligation to pay back society. The baseline is that we owe something to society–we’re not a doing a favor by paying back society.

Personally, I agree with everything that Guy talks about above. The one thing that we must be careful about is with how far we go with some of these things. Specifically as it pertains to points 1 and 2. It seems that if we aren’t careful we can end up wasting time helping people who need our help while sacrificing our own time and money in the process. Doing this on a small scale (this is relative to where you are at personally) is perfectly acceptable but how far do you go before you are not helping someone, you are being used.

We have all done someone a favor and then seen that other person turn into the cable guy after the fact. Always wanting more and working to get every last bit of time, patience and energy that we have left.

I have always believed in giving without expectation of return and to help people without regard to how it will benefit me. Entrepreneurs, in general, tend to be giving people.  Because of this I think having a filter for how to manage your relationships would be important.  Is a better question, how will helping this person possibly hurt me? Do I have the time? The resources? How do you manage your relationship capital? Am I off base with my thinking? Would love to know your thoughts.

PS…For more on relationship capital, listen to my podcast below.