Relationship Building is not a Silver Bullet!

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Today's episode is made possible by our sponsor, NZ Mortgages. You can check them out at NZMortgages Co NZ. Well, let's talk about relationships. We all know that relationships drive revenue in a lot of ways. All of our businesses are people businesses. I imagine you need people to buy from you, to work with you, to be clients and to work alongside you. That's generally how most businesses work. So I've done a bit of research around when we have a team, an organization, we've got multiple people, so two or more people working in a team, there's relationships and often performance rankings like who's the top performer in my team, who's the high performer. All those rankings are based on certain elements and many would say that people's ability to build relationships, nurture relationships, directly impacts where they rank and on a leader's performance ranking. So recently I just want, I wanted to share this with you because recently I've done a bit of digging and thanks to Joseph Folkman. He did an amazing Forbes contributory piece. It was a really great piece around relationship building and I would say the takeaway from this is relationship is not the silver bullet. And he took data from 12,299 individuals and explored the link between relationship building and and performance rankings. And the managers evaluated every individual on 59 behaviors and then related the level of productivity and effort to then give a performance ranking. Now the outcomes were quite staggering. And I know in working with teams, whether it's the army, whether it's corporate, whether it's commercial real estate, whether it's a small startup, often it's all about relationship building, networking, building within a team. You know, having team culture built through relationships, that's a very, very high priority. Often within the top three, where does it sit for you? So either you're leading people or you're being led or both, but where does that sit for you? How important do you think relationship building is in connection with our performance ranking? So you've got 100 team members, one to 100, the top 10, the top 20. How vital do you think relationship building is in connecting that with their performance rankings and outputs? Well, the results were quite astonishing. And what we find here, there were seven other capabilities, according to Folkman, and seven other capabilities that had greater influence on performance rankings. I'm going to share five of those with you. Right, These are five things that are absolutely critical if you want to be ranked higher and actually perform better. Against all of these assessments that were done across a massive amount of people, 12,000 plus people ranked over 50 plus behaviors, very significant. These other things rose to Top of the Pops above relationship building as a key skill. Now, we're not saying here don't build relationships. You know, relationships are core to what we do. In fact, the quality of your relationships in life and business often dictates the quality of your life itself. Your experience, your perception of life is often a reflection of the quality and depth of your relationships. But let's chat about it here. We're going to go from five down to one one being the top of the pop. So number five, a person who takes initiative, that was number five, way ahead of relationship building. That was a very important indicator of performance ranking. Someone who takes initiative. We all love being around people who just get going. Self starters, if we want a high performing team, we've got to have people who can take initiative, who can get going, take big moves, take swings and not need to always come and ask questions. Of course, when you're starting out in a new team, you're going to ask lots of questions. So very quickly we want to be building autonomy. So if you're leading others, how autonomous are they? Number four, a person who displays high integrity and honesty. Now that's so crucial because people who do display those things, of course that's going to impact how they perform and it's certainly going to really impact the perception of a leader who's looking at them going, where would I rank them? Someone who's got high integrity, they say they're going to do the thing. They follow through and do the thing. Oh, my goodness, that's awesome. That's a really good indicator that they're a high performer, without a doubt. Number three, a person who inspires and motivates others to be high performers. That's huge when you think about it. If you've got someone who's constantly building relationships.

That doesn't say much. It just says that they like to chat and connect and ask questions versus someone who inspires and motivates others to be high performers. We know that the person who inspires others to be a high performer, that's going to equate to better performance right around the team. So if you want to elevate your rankings and your performance and the perception of the person, you report to start inspiring more people and motivating them to be high performers. Not pointing the finger, not telling them what they're doing wrong, but inspiring them to strive for more. It comes down to tonality. It comes down to tempo, intonation. I've heard people say, you've got to do this and you've got to do that. And this is what we do if we're going to be the best. Nobody wants to listen to that. Let's be honest. It's how you say the thing. Number two, a person who drives for results.

So that's way higher up the rankings than a person who's a relationship builder within a team. Person who drives for results. Why? It moves them forward. They kick the can down the road. They don't sit and look at the can and go, what's that? What should I do with it? Let's move. The results driven and the proof is always in the pudding. So I want you to think about, are you focused on results or are you constantly just chatting and having conversations and you're that person that always does the coffee and never gets to the clothesline and where does it sit? Now, I know you want to know what is number one. Well, I'm going to tell you, but for now, please take a moment. If you're on Apple or Spotify, hit subscribe. You know, hit that button where you can come back and follow the show. That's how I can continue to grow the show and reach more people like you. That's what the show is all about. So please take a moment to do that. If you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. That would be massive. I'd really appreciate it. Now, number one, what is it in your mind? Can you think what it might be? What is the number One thing that these 12,000 plus people who were assessed by managers who looked at 59 of their behaviors, this one thing that had them sit at the very top of performance rankings. Number one, very simple. The person's ability to establish stretch goals. You heard it here first. The person's ability to establish stretch goals. Right. To me, when I look at hpl, my framework, the very first part of it is vision setting or visioning, I like to call it. When we vision or envision we're setting a stretch goal, pushing it out into the future. Something that's a little unreasonable, uncomfortable, It's a push. That is the number one factor for determining performance rankings. Someone who can set a stretch goal. Now, we can all do that. Very few do. Very few write it down. Very few are comfortable writing it down because it is a stretch, it is a push. It might not be achievable. That's the whole idea. Jim Collins wrote good to great. You may have read it. If you haven't, please put it on your list. Jim Collins wrote good to great and in there he talked about the bhag. He was the guy who termed it the biggest hairy, audacious goal. That's a stretch goal. It's uncomfortable. It should be outside your comfort zone. I don't like to call it big hairy on audacious because I'm not sure everyone is really connected with hairy and big. But what I like to call it is a Mount Everest. Your Everest. Watch your Everest. It should be a stretch. It should be a push. You know, you might not get there if you try really hard, you still might not get there, but if you do, man, oh man, it'll be phenomenal. And of course your performance rankings, your outcomes, your sales, et cetera will reflect that. So I really hope that this has sat with you or got you to think a little bit about your performance and your team and think to yourself, out of those five, what am I doing? I'm going to read them now. 1 to 5. A person's ability to establish stretch goals. A person who drives for results, A person who inspires and motivates others to high performance, person who displays high integrity and honesty. And fifth, a person who takes initiative. All of those ranked above. A person who simply builds relationships. So still build your relationships, but do these other things, prioritize them, keep them top of the pops. If you want to drop me a line, you know, on Spotify and Apple, you can go into the show notes and there's a little link. It says, send me a text message, please send that. I love hearing from you, what you like, what you don't like, what you want more of. And I'll be sure to read some of them out on the show. So please do that. And if you don't want to do that, flick me a Message, please, on LinkedIn. Connect with me over there. I'd love to hear from you, but for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. Today's episode is made possible by our sponsor, NZ Mortgages. You can check them out at nzmortgages Co nz. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.