Virtuous Cycle of Importance to develop Human Connections

Reflections — As I travelled in my first long haul flight after couple of years due to pandemic, from Detroit to SFO, I had mixed emotions of excitement and anxiety to meet our colleagues, customers and partners after a long time and also concerns about the safety of everyone including myself. World has changed a lot since March 2020 and many aspects of building business and personal relationships have evolved in the virtual world. The impact of pandemic in our own lives have made us more humane yet have fierce resolve to make an impact on business, drive bolder ambitions and build better teams remains on the top of the agenda of many business leaders. As i reflect ways of doing business and building personal relationships, joint value creation and mutual success remains top priority.

World of Human Connections — One of the areas that have become even more important is our ability to build human connections. It is important to build business and even beyond which I call as “beyond business human connections”. In one of my previous articles in Forbes, I talked about sales is a team sport and team success is more important than individual success. I want to extend this thought that our business world is all about building better human connections whether it is with our customers, partners, suppliers and our own and extended teams. Concerted efforts to be made to build that human connection to drive high performance and bolder vision.

Virtuous Cycle — “Am I important” to “I am important” journey as we build human connections — We have heard that people like to do business who they like and trust in longer terms. I have analyzed and experienced the journey of “Am I important” to “I am important cycle” with long term customer relationship and team relationship and when hiring new team members for the business. This journey has become even more important as business relationships turned virtual in last couple of years and many of our team members have not met in person.

I would like to share some perspective in this important aspect of building this virtuous cycle.

Building Virtuous Cycle of importance with Customers — Whether we are trying to establish new relationship or working with a customer for many years. This aspect plays very important role to build long term mutually beneficial and growing partnership. They continue to evaluate us whether they are given importance in relationship, peer level connections and helping them in case of need on priority basis.

Every business relationship goes through its up and downs but when the questions of importance comes, it always plays a very important role. Importance is not about always solving the problems or agreeing on every request. It is far beyond and emotional. Customer expects that this relationship is important and they are important to me as organization and as a human beings. Their success is extremely important to me and I will go above and beyond to make them feel important. Sales and business leaders need to think this as one of the critical component and be authentic about it.

Building Virtuous Cycle of Importance with Employees — This aspect of making employees feel that they are important has become even more critical. With great resignations phenomenon and everyone is trying to find “path forward” in their careers as many myths broken about travels, in person connections, water cooler chats and work-life balances. Building this virtuous cycle of importance is very critical to prevent attrition.

Business leaders to rethink their strategies to engage, communicate and build human connections and create virtuous cycle of importance. We, all human beings wants to feel valued and important in business and personal lives. We need to take time in our busy schedules and create space of this aspects intentionally and authentically. Its calls for business leaders to build that level of trust and then giving employees similar importance as customers.

Talent hiring is very important to drive growth and attracting talent is first step to create that virtuous cycle of importance with prospective employees. This cycle of importance can be driven by common individual purpose statement, examples of leadership behaviors, basics like speeding up recruitment processes and most importantly showing compassion in hiring cycle. Today choices are mutual and appreciating that is biggest steps of creating this virtuous cycle of importance.

In conclusion, building human connections are becoming very critical to drive growth. We need to spend more time as business leaders in creating this virtuous cycle of importance with our employees and customers intentionally and authentically in new era of post pandemic world and Great Resignation.