5

Relationship Maps

If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.

—SCOTT STRATTON AND ALLISON KRAMER

Catherine was a wizard with numbers. She was a strategic thinker who was accustomed to being the brightest finance mind in the room. She attended a prestigious university and went on to Harvard Business School. In the first third of her career, Catherine worked at a small but elite private equity firm, where she made a name for herself using financial modeling to identify undervalued companies in the media and entertainment sector.

The firm where she worked was full of savvy individual contributors who thrived in the highly competitive, high-adrenaline culture. The bankers who delivered the most deals got promoted. Although Catherine generally came out looking great based on her brainpower, she wasn’t gaining the recognition from the senior partners that she expected. In time, she decided to make the move to a company that could provide a clearer career path and the chance to run the finance side of a growing business.

With her résumé and Ivy League connections, Catherine had little difficulty moving into an executive finance role at a media conglomerate. Her job was managing the numbers for one of the organization’s most visible business units. She worked closely with the chief operating officer and she reported directly to the CFO. Catherine had every reason to believe that she was the full package—smart, insightful, and hard working. Unfortunately, she had an Achilles’ heel that trumped her strengths and eventually set her career back significantly.

Catherine worked hard and was very bright, but at times she acted in an arrogant manner—like she knew more than everyone else. She believed her strong performance would always be enough and she did not need anyone’s support. As a result, her key connections never became strong relationships, much less solid allies or advocates.

The cracks became evident about a year into her tenure. The company was heading into a buying spree, picking up smaller players and integrating them into the portfolio. Catherine knew a great deal about buyouts from her private equity days, and she became a vocal critic of several deals that she felt sure were mistakes. She spent long nights reviewing every aspect of potential deals. When proposals she disliked came up for discussion, she invariably excoriated the deal sponsors and anyone on the team who supported them. When individuals disagreed with her perspective, she vocalized her dissent forcefully and publicly. One day she made the mistake of roundly disparaging a potential deal that had the implicit blessing of the CFO and CEO. After that, the CEO was no longer her supporter. Catherine’s executive colleagues, seeing an opportunity, publicly turned against her. She came to realize just how alone and exposed she was.

When we met with Catherine a few months later, conditions had not improved, and she was feeling confused and isolated. We spoke to her colleagues as part of our coaching process, and the results couldn’t have been clearer: her success in the past was heavily dependent on individual performance, whereas her current job required teamwork, the sharing of information, and the creation of a consensus.

Catherine had failed to understand a paramount tenet for success: you can’t have influence without forging strategic, mutually beneficial relationships. We tell this unique story to make our point. We know Catherine is not every woman, but you must never underestimate the power of relationships and building trust with your colleagues. Rarely do we see a Catherine succeed.

THE UNWRITTEN RULE: Relationships Drive Influence

As women, we are naturally skilled relationship builders in our personal lives. All four of us are spouses, mothers, sisters, and friends, and we’ve spent what cumulatively amounts to many lifetimes supporting (and being supported by) our friends and families. Yet, as executive coaches, we see that we, as women, don’t always bring that innate ability with us when we forge careers and drive our professional agendas.

In Catherine’s case, she didn’t recognize until it was too late how she was “landing on” her colleagues—that is, how they perceived her words and actions. She was not aware that her take-no-prisoners nature was destroying the few relationships she had managed to forge. As we rise through the ranks at work, all of us need to bring the full package forward, and that includes being cognizant of where we stand with colleagues. In our research, we found that women have a higher degree of difficulty, compared to male colleagues, in creating and sustaining a strong cadre of influential allies who will advance our ideas and boost our careers. In part, this is because men tap into the existing male network that has been built up over many generations. Another theory is that we, as women, don’t prioritize connection time—we’re busy balancing the competing demands of family and career. In addition, many women roundly disdain activities that fall under the banner of “office politics.” Building coalitions and developing alliances can seem like dirty pool to some of us.

As we move into higher levels of leadership, it’s important to think about key business relationships in a more strategic way. It requires doing your homework and getting to know your organization: Who are the influencers, the decision makers, the gatekeepers, and so on? Coalitions require connections, and relationship building, therefore, becomes a prerequisite for influence.

One reason women neglect to make the right connections at the office may be related to gender dynamics. Linguistics and communications expert Deborah Tannen asserts that men and women make connections very differently. Women, she says, look for similarities between people, and they make connections by fostering common ground. Men focus on differences—in status or skills—and they connect by engaging with each other through good-natured banter and competition.¹ We believe our focus on common ground is a plus for women; however, we often fail to use it in our professional lives.

LIMITING BELIEFS: What’s Holding You Back?

There’s no doubt that fostering professional relationships requires a commitment to connecting with like-minded allies, supportive followers, executive sponsors, mentors, and many others. In our work, we help women with this critical endeavor, and we will mention some tricks of the trade that make it more manageable. First, there are several limiting beliefs and behaviors that hold us back from building the strategic relationships we need to succeed.

“Hard work is what matters most”

By all accounts, Catherine worked long hours and was a brilliant financial strategist. As we saw, that wasn’t enough. In fact, Catherine was judged less on what she achieved than on what she failed to achieve. She hadn’t cultivated professional relationships.

There are a couple of factors at play in this limiting belief. First, we know that the corporate world is not strictly egalitarian. Hard work gets us noticed early in our careers, but higher-order accomplishments—like followership and results—matter more as we move up the organizational food chain. A number of women put it succinctly in our interviews, including one C-suite executive at a nonprofit, who told us, “Women have seen that it is not always the most capable person who gets promoted. We need to take the time to look around and understand how decisions are really made, because it is not based on merit alone.”

As we tell the women we coach, hard work is just the table stake. Once you have a seat at the table, success and influence stem from relationships and followership.

Similarly, working hard is not the same as working strategically. The projects that monopolize our attention are not necessarily the ones that offer the prestige and visibility of high-profile assignments. Being strategic is about knowing when to say yes and when to say no. A wise woman once told us not to check the same box twice. If you have already led that task force or served on that internal committee, then don’t say yes again. If influence is the goal, then it is crucial to work strategically with a larger purpose in mind.

In short, working hard is necessary but not sufficient for achieving influence. Forging professional relationships and organizational alignments is the real “hard work” that needs to get done.

What got you here won’t take you there!²

“I need to like (and trust) them . . . and be liked back”

Women take relationships seriously. As a result, we sometimes put conditions on professional interactions and make them more complicated than they need to be.

I need to like them. In one instance, a client told us she wasn’t interested in meeting an influential colleague (and potential future sponsor) because she wasn’t sure she liked the colleague. This is a common refrain. In our work, we see that women want to like people before they connect with them at corporate events, dinners, and off-sites. This type of unnecessary “friendship filter” leads to missed opportunities and lost chances to get to know the people who can help us succeed. The reality is that we may never really like the person who ends up being our strongest ally on a key project. More important than liking them is getting to know them and determining whether there is common ground from which to move forward.

I need to trust them. Another filter many of us use in office interactions is trust. We stay far away from the people we deem untrustworthy. Perhaps we think these individuals are “political” or we suspect that they don’t have our best interests at heart. News flash: not trusting someone is an excellent reason to get to know him or her. Once you become acquainted, you might decide that the person is indeed trustworthy. If not, at least you’ve gained some insight into how he or she thinks and acts. In other words, knowledge is power. It is important to know whom you can trust, but it’s even more important to manage relationships proactively. In our own careers, we have faced colleagues and bosses whom we did not trust. All of us need to navigate these dicey relationships, not fight them or ignore them.

I need them to like me. Just as we want to like the people we align with at work, we also want them to like us back. We want to be seen as nice, and it can keep us from achieving influence. Part of what sustains this limiting belief is the double bind that says women at work can be liked or they can be competent—but they can’t be both. This age-old barrier is out there in full force. In our research, we found that the vast majority of men (65.9 percent) and women (81.9 percent) agree that women are still judged differently, and more harshly, than men when they use the tools of influence.

This double bind plays into three distinct dynamics that affect how we forge our professional relationships:

• Women don’t want to be perceived as phony. Many women don’t like “working the room” in meetings. We feel inauthentic when we scope out the people who can help us succeed professionally. The result? We avoid these situations entirely.
• Women don’t like to ask for help. Research shows that women are less comfortable asking for what we want or need, including select assignments, sponsors, pay increases, and promotions.³ We don’t ask for these and other favors, in part, because we don’t want to damage our relationships or be seen as users. What does this mean for us? People do not know what we need and therefore cannot help us have the careers we desire.
• Women don’t trade favors. Several of the women and men we interviewed said that they believe women are less comfortable than men when thinking about relationships as transactional in nature. Women, then, are less likely to engage in dealmaking that would benefit them because they don’t want to be seen as calculating. How does that play out? We hold on to all our “frequent flyer miles” (favors owed to us) and never cash them in!

Clearly, we must gain respect and be taken seriously to achieve the type of influence we want. Although being liked certainly is helpful, it is just a small part of the influence equation.

“It’s personal”

Many of us dislike sports metaphors and battle analogies in business. And yet, a number of men told us they internalize the idea that business is like a game. The metaphor helps them remain neutral—you win some, you lose some. They don’t take criticism or professional slights personally. One chief operating officer told us, “Men realize that sometimes you lose the battle but you can still win the war.” Another male executive put it like this: “Men beat each other up in a meeting and then go out and have a beer together. It’s in our DNA and it’s reinforced by our experiences growing up.”

Women, however, told us that business relationships feel personal to them and they get “stuck in the moment” when situations go awry. Karen Dahut, executive vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, told us about an experience from earlier in her career that’s indicative of this limiting belief:

I was in an executive committee meeting a while back and I put out some controversial points. I knew they would be controversial. We debated for a good while. I led the heated debate but eventually realized we could go no further, so I closed the conversation. But I thought about it for the entire weekend. I worried about harming my [professional] relationships. I wondered what it would take to get them back on track. Then, on Monday, I saw some of my male colleagues and they greeted me as usual. I worried about it all weekend . . . and to them it was nothing!

Taking difficult professional interactions personally has a toll on women and makes it more difficult for us to manage relationships strategically and establish the type of influence we need to lead.

STEPS for Making Relationships Strategic

You have to figure out the way decisions get made in the white space and who makes them. Influence and relationships always overlap.

—KATY HOLLISTER, MANAGING PARTNER, STRATEGY, GLOBAL TAX AND LEGAL, DELOITTE

Sharon was thrilled and excited to move into a leadership role that was only two levels away from the executive team running the organization. But she was also extremely nervous. Her company was a large, diverse, suit-and-tie culture that was filled with high-caliber people. The field itself—management consulting—was notoriously competitive, and Sharon’s firm was no exception.

Sharon had a lot of things going for her: She was excellent at her job and made a name for herself as a big-picture thinker. She was able to read the mood of a room and identify the underlying interpersonal dynamics. Yet her new role would not be without challenges: She needed to prove herself to her new boss, Larry, and his cadre of senior executive peers. And she also needed to get to know the CEO if she was going to succeed in her role and move up again soon. There were two women on the top tier of the company (alongside the CEO and three other men), and Sharon’s ultimate goal was to leap two levels and join them.

We began coaching Sharon as soon as her promotion was finalized. She gave us a rundown on the firm and the entire senior management team, including nuanced insights into each person’s personality and what she perceived to be his or her motivation. Sharon had done her homework. We talked to her about how she could carve a place for herself among the other leaders by focusing on building strategic relationships with her new peers, as well as the executive team.

She began by meeting weekly with Larry. The best thing she could do, she reasoned, was to interact with him in a positive way, continue to make a good impression, and succeed at her job overall. By delivering results and including him in her plans, she made him look good. Sharon had a talent for creating a halo effect around her close colleagues. It didn’t take long for Larry to become a fan.

The culture at the firm was the same as it had been for decades—decentralized and social. Following Larry’s counsel, Sharon planned a lunch with the CEO and started to interact with him whenever she had the chance—at meetings and occasionally over coffee. In time, and as Sharon’s business continued to deliver strong results, she established trust with the CEO, who eventually became a strong advocate.

The five-member management team was a somewhat tougher nut to crack. To help her think through her strategy for building those relationships, Sharon pulled out a legal pad and mapped out the leadership team: their roles within the company, how they were aligned with each other, their relationship with the CEO, and some notes to herself about their business goals. It took some time, but she met with them, one by one, over a period of months and managed for the most part to win their tacit support. She looked for opportunities to interact with them and reinforce the initial connections she established. Eventually, it came down to two stubborn holdouts that Sharon felt were less eager to support her—and were quite possibly willing to block her next promotion.

Sharon took a proactive, long-term approach to the problem. First, she managed to get herself placed on a project team that was extremely important to one of the holdouts. She showed her support for his vested interests by moving the project to the next level, and it went a long way toward cementing the relationship. That last individual? Well, Sharon was never able to get through to him, and she struggles with the relationship even today.

Still, Sharon’s efforts and her natural talent with people landed her a promotion and a senior management assignment. About a year later, due to some organizational changes and a retirement, Sharon was appointed to the executive team of the organization—her ultimate objective.

There’s a lot we can learn from Sharon. Her natural ability to forge relationships and bring people over to her side is worth examining. And it’s also worth noting that once Sharon reached her objective and received her seat on the leadership team, several things changed for her, but one big thing remained the same: she still needed to work as hard as ever to manage relationships.

1. Begin with the end in mind

In The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey says that beginning with the end in mind means maintaining “a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.”⁴

Strategically managing office relationships begins with nurturing your vision, which we explored in chapter 2. Sharon’s vision led directly to her spot on the executive team. Unlike many of us, she internalized where she wanted to go and cultivated the right relationships to get her there. Whether your goal is to sell a particular idea or land a new job, achieving it entails looking at relationships through two lenses: planning and focus.

Planning is a core part of building and maintaining the right professional relationships. It entails looking at all the things you want to achieve and isolating what’s really important. After that, planning is about reviewing goals periodically, determining if you are on the right course, changing direction as needed, and knowing how to measure success. Having these steps in mind guides you as you decide how to network and who to engage for assistance.

Let’s look at Sharon’s situation:

Goal:	Have a seat at the leadership table.
Why:	To be able to have her voice impact the future of the firm.
Situation:	Sharon had longevity at the firm with a successful track record. Her business was booming and she was given much of the credit for that success. She was a known people person. She sat two levels away from the leadership table.
Need:	Build critical relationships in order to move up as circumstances allowed. Be at the top of the list for future leadership positions.

The focus phase is less straightforward. Focus is the link that connects planning and execution. In order to factor relationships into your strategic focus, you need to know the people and political dynamics of the organization and understand how the two overlap. (This is where Catherine went wrong: she had a plan, but she failed to factor in people and relationships.) The best way we know to connect these dots is to draw a relationship map.

2. Draw a relationship map

The primary tool we use to help women become role-model relationship builders is called a relationship map. Relationship maps are utilized most frequently in sales jobs to help salespeople close deals by mapping out influencers, decision makers, deal advocates, and deal blockers. Many times, sales organizations use complex software and lead generation databases to help people create the relationship maps they need.

For our purposes, the only prop required is a legal pad, a whiteboard, or a simple online chart you can create yourself—use whatever format is easiest for you to work with. Figure 8 contains some simple relationship map formats for you to consider that will help you visualize the work ahead of you.

FIGURE 8 Relationship Maps—Four Formats That Work

Relationship maps can help you achieve influence by creating a structure to accomplish three things:

Understand your network. A relationship map guides us to visualize our network of colleagues, as well as relevant outside parties and stakeholders, to identify the people who are in the best position to help us achieve our objectives.

Figure 9 shows Sharon’s relationship map as it looked when she received her initial promotion. These were the teams that would ultimately decide her fate, and she was starting in a position of relative strength because she had strong connections with some of them already.

FIGURE 9 Sharon—Her Relationship Map

Sharon was operating two levels below the executive team. Her goal was to move up quickly and be the third woman appointed to the five-member team. In order to achieve that lofty objective, she identified the executive colleagues whom she would need to interact with. In some cases, she would simply need to become closely acquainted with the person; in others, she would need to win the person over to become an ally or a sponsor.

Map out meaningful connections. Relationship maps help us identify where people are positioned as part of an organizational hierarchy or influence network. They also help us understand whose opinion carries weight and who is closely connected to the main decision makers. As part of the mapping process, it is smart to consider how informal networks come into play and recognize that job titles do not always equal influence. It is important, as well, to construct your map with your professional objective in mind.

On Sharon’s map, we see five direct reports to the CEO. Sharon had three of these individuals as sponsors already. An additional two were closely aligned with the CEO, and not strongly allied with Sharon. The CEO, who was new to the organization, did not know Sharon well and would not promote her without more “votes” for her from the others. She went to work based on that knowledge.

Enact a plan. Formulate an action plan by examining your relationship map and asking yourself these questions:

• Who do I need to get to know to achieve my objective? What’s important to them? Sharon knew who her targets were. No mystery!
• What networks of influence exist in my organization? For Sharon, it was all about the people sitting at the top and the next level down.
• Who will make the final decision? Who on my map is closely aligned with this person? The CEO would not make it happen for Sharon without the majority on his team agreeing and actively supporting her. Before she began, Sharon had three of the five in support of her.
• Who will be most difficult to win over and why? Who may choose to block me? Sharon was clear on who the blockers were. In the end, she managed to win over one of the two.
• What political dynamics and extenuating circumstances must I keep in mind? Things change, and what works today will not work six months from now. (This is an important lens through which to view career and work dynamics.)
• How can I get started? Get real and start mapping out your situation. Write it down!

Sharon used her relationship map to efficiently network and become strategically aligned with the people who mattered most. Was she being calculating? Manipulative? No! She was being smart and effective. In fact, it was a large part of her job to get to know the executive team and work with them. One of the reasons Sharon got promoted so fast? She understood her executive colleagues, what they stood for, and how they were connected to each other and to her.

Relationship maps create a framework for understanding the network of professional contacts that surround us, and help us move ahead to forge the professional relationships that matter most.

3. Examine the culture

While a relationship map can serve as our strategy document, creating a bedrock of supporters also requires understanding the culture and norms within your organization. Ask yourself, is your culture hierarchical or informal? In many organizations, it is entirely acceptable to e-mail your boss’s boss with a new business idea. In others, this type of off-the-cuff behavior is considered taboo and you need to go through your manager. Company conventions need not be followed to the letter every time, but it’s essential to know the norms and be strategic in how you proceed. Understand who really makes the decisions.

Alice had been an executive at a Fortune 500 media corporation in New York City for nearly a decade when she set her sights on landing a very big job: publisher of a national magazine. She had done her homework all along the way: she sought feedback about her performance and career potential, took several lateral positions to gain broad exposure and strategic experience, made her career aspirations known, built relationships with all the key players, took risks, built a coalition, and so on.

When her prized job became available, Alice wanted it and she stepped up to ask. She felt secure in the knowledge that she had done all that she needed to do. The day the decision was being made, she got the nod and was elated. She left the office having been secretly assured that the job was hers. However, when she returned to the office the next morning, fully expecting to read an announcement with her name in it, she found that the job had been given to someone else (another extremely deserving and smart woman!).

What happened? Over the course of twelve hours, the organizational structure had shifted and Alice’s boss had changed roles. The new boss knew the other candidate much better, and he chose her for the role. Things change quickly when top jobs are at stake.

Moral of the story: you need widespread support, and you need to know everyone who has the power to either support or veto you.

Post mortem: if Alice had actually created a relationship map, and been completely honest with herself, she might have seen this coming and been slightly more prepared.

Take a close look at social customs and conventions and how they play out in your workplace. Things had always moved fast at Alice’s corporation, and she might have anticipated this eleventh-hour power shift. Make notes at the bottom of your relationship map and build them into your professional plan.

4. Establish common ground

Strategic relationship building is made easier by listening up and learning something about the people around you—and using it to forge an authentic connection. As you work through your relationship map, do your homework and determine what information will help you connect in a win-win way.

Beth, a woman we’ve coached, is a self-proclaimed “Boston-born, Irish-Catholic from a large family, who grew up spending weekends at Fenway Park.” Beth loves to talk about Boston. When she learned that her incoming boss was a Red Sox fan, she saw an easy opportunity to connect—and she seized it.

“The first thing we talked about was baseball, and it was an instant ice breaker,” she said. “It created a real connection and we were able to build a relationship based on shared interests.”

This strategy really works; however, we would argue that finding common ground may be different for women and men. As mentioned previously, research by Deborah Tannen shows that whereas women use similarities to connect, men connect through sports and competition. Although you don’t need to join a fantasy football team to network effectively with male colleagues, it’s important to accommodate gender differences in your networking strategy.

An apt way to make this work is to find out what is important to male and female influencers. Remember, Sharon won over one of her chief detractors by collaborating on a project they both wanted to advance. Be it baseball or travel, find something to talk about or sponsor a project together. Common ground helps form strong relationships and becomes the basis for future influence.

5. Take action!

The best advice is usually the simplest: avoid overthinking things and just do something. Next time you are killing time waiting for a plane, write down key relationships. Don’t eat lunch alone at your desk. Don’t stand on the sidelines during group discussions. Look at your relationship map and use your time wisely. One simple way to make this mind shift stick is to set a goal for yourself. Challenge yourself to meet with one new colleague each week. Boost your momentum in this situation by finding someone who is masterful at forming strategic alliances and watch that person work. Better yet, sit with him or her and ask for advice. Once you become accustomed to being friendly and exhibiting confidence, you’ll learn that most people want to help. Are there times when you get shut out of a conversation? Has your meeting with the CEO been canceled again? Yes, everyone gets flattened sometimes—don’t give up.

The good news is that building relationships gets easier with practice. If you engage with influencers every chance you get over a six-month period, imagine how much progress you’ll make. Making strategic connections has a cumulative effect and so does influence. Soon, the payoff will become apparent and you’ll be an influencer yourself.

Executive Summary

• Relationships form the foundation for influence.
• Working hard is never enough. Forging professional relationships and alignments is the real “hard work” we need to do.
• It is more important to get to know colleagues and determine if there is common ground from which to move forward than it is to like people and be liked.
• Taking difficult professional interactions personally makes it harder for us to establish the influence we need to lead.
• Creating a relationship map adds rigor to our process and helps us identify influencers.
• Common ground helps us forge strong relationships, and it becomes the basis for future influence.
• Take action. From achieving job growth to forging consensus for your agenda, relationships pay dividends.