165. Increasing the Value of Relationship Currency

Foreign. Hey, my friend. Welcome back to leadership in a nutshell, cracking the code of that driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. I am honored to have you. Episode 165. We're talking about increasing the value of relationship currency today. Relationship currency, baby. I'm talking about investing. Investing. I'm talking about having some cash, making it rain. When it comes to your relationships, man, as, as leaders, you know, this is what we have. We've got relationship currency, right? You know, in, in. In different areas of your life, you think about what's. What's in your wallet. Where's. My wallet's out of reach on my desk. But, like, you know, you've got your wallet, you've got currency in there, and you've got currency that shows up maybe in. In cash. Do you still have some cash? I'm one of those weird guys that likes to carry cash. And I don't know, it comes from my childhood, always being broke and never having any cash. I like lovely Christie's, like, why do you need to carry that much cash? I don't know. It gives me some comfort. Anybody with me on that? I don't know. Now, don't roll me if you see me out on the streets. Cause I might have a few green backs on me. But more important than that, I've got credit cards, right? So I've got some credit cards in my wallet that. That represents some currency, some ability to, you know, transfer value for other value. And when I, you know, when I talk about myself as an investor, I primarily, at this stage in my life, career, and where I'm at in my own physical, spiritual journey, I'm an investor in two primary categories. And it might surprise you that it's not the Dow Jones and the nasdaq. It is human capital and experience capital. That's where I invest. I want to invest in relationships with humans that go create amazing things and create massive value in the world. And I want to invest in incredible life experiences and business experiences. And I believe that we got this opportunity to play this incredible game of life on this amazing Earth, that we get to just wake up and just be in awe every day that we get a chance to play this game of life. And I just. I just want to experience as much as I can. Like, it's just so cool that we get this chance. And so today I want to. I just wanted to share with you, like, how do we increase the value of this relationship currency if I'm going to be in a relationship with you in a, you know, My, my intimate relationship, that's, that's off the table because I'm, I'm good there. I'm squared away. Lovely. Christy and I found each other and we're were dialed. But when it comes to business relationships and collaborative relationships and different, I'm always looking for quality relationships like this. So if we're going to up level our value to each other in any kind of another, of another relationship, there's a few things I want to share with you. Today I'm going to share five. Last week I had a list of 10 and kind of rattled on you and went through. Today I just want to talk about five things. Okay, I'll keep it to the point and I just, just think about these things. Number one, quality listening or active listening. If we're going to engage in increasing our relationship capital, I want you to listen to me. I don't want you to hear me. I don't want you to nod to me with your eyes looking through me, looking at the back of my head and kind of giving me the okay, yeah, when's he going to stop talking so I can jump back in here? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for that active listening where you're actually paying attention, where you're, you know, engaged with me. The lovely Christy and I recently switched our medical care to a health partner that's a functional concierge doctor here in Scottsdale that we, you know, we've been on a list to get in and when we had our first, like what they call orientation or whatever, you know, when we go in to meet, he was just really paying attention and we had to fill out all this paperwork and he actually read the paperwork. And then as he was asking us questions and we were giving him answers, he was listening to what we were saying and you could tell, and I knew right then this is going to be a productive relationship because he's not just there going, oh, you got a pain there? Here's a script, get out. I got a zillion other people to see. It's just different. And I want you to think about how that shows up. Obviously, we teach the heck out of this in our Professional Tech Academy and Office Champions Academy and Sales Specialist Academy. All of our communication based academies, we talk about the same in Management Growth, same in Outbounding same. You know, it's, it's just a matter of dispatch as well. Like listening is huge, my friend, and that's why I start here. Any relationship in your life, whether it's Business, whether it's personal, whether it's friends, whether it's, you know, the, the kids, coaches as they're playing sports, whatever it is, listen to people and just, just, you know, write me back and hit me back and tell me that this doesn't make a positive impact in your life and theirs. Because then you're not reeling in your head like, oh, crap, did they say that? Did I, did I catch that right? What was what, what was that? Oh, I'm not sure. Listen. Okay, so I've got your ear now because you're listening to this podcast. So that's a, that's a positive thing. Number two, consistent communication. Now why do I say consistent? Because as leaders, we communicate. There's no doubt. And I've worked with hundreds of high level leaders over the course of my career. I've trained thousands of frontline team members and reached, I don't know, maybe 100,000 from the stage. And so, and certainly with circle of influence, tapping millions now. And consistent communication is what's really missing because we communicate when we have a need, right? Oh, your performance is down a little bit. I need you to do this. I'm going to train you, I'm going to coach you, whatever. But then it kind of goes away. And when I don't know what I'm going to get from you as your follower or as your direct report or whatever, I hold up my, my, my, you know, walls a little bit. I'm going to push back. I'm not sure, like, oh boy, here we go. You know, how many of you, you know, last last month, a little over a month, semiannual, big event, every other or every six months or acceleration days, workshop at blue collar. And it was our best event ever. And you know, and all these kinds of things and, and you know, people go back all fired up. But the challenge is blue collar gets thrown under the bus sometimes because leaders go back all fired up. And I'm going to just communicate and I'm going to make all these changes and then it falls off. It's not consistent because you lost your excitement, you lost your dopamine, you lost your adrenaline and, and then can't whistle. There we go, right? It just slowly goes down and I'm not gonna wait for the. Okay, well, there was a little crash there. You don't have to go down and crash. Just hey, wow, I need to communicate a little more consistently. What you consistently communicate is what matters, not what you communicate. Cause you can pop in and go, oh my gosh, we had this Terrible month and everybody sucks and we gotta do all this training or you can go, oh, we had a great month. We're gonna cancel training for the web. Oh, we got a big job, we're not gonna train this week. That stuff matters and that's communication and you gotta keep it consistent. Okay, Number three, accountability. When you uplevel accountability, you uplevel the value of relationship currency. Why do I say that? Because people want to be held accountable. They want to be held accountable. The challenge is they don't necessarily wanna be held accountable the way that we hold people accountable a lot of times. What do I mean by that? They have a desire, but they haven't completely committed to themselves yet. They haven't really gotten over that hump. So that's why we've got to go layers deeper of like, why? What are you trying to accomplish? Why do you want to accomplish that? What is the mental program that you're running in order that tells you you can or cannot do that? What are the limiting beliefs that you might have around this situation? What do we need to shed when we really want to get into your own greatness? When you think about these things and the reality is every top performer that's ever walked the planet has had some sort of a coach, some sort of an accountability partner, some sort of a peer that brought out the best in them. And so when you up level accountability and based on people's terms, asking them what they want, what they're looking for. I want to be held accountable in my relationships, in my business. I want to hold other people accountable to their best. That's why, you know, when I, when I wrote the, the, the my last book, Blue Collar Success Laws, Aligned accountability is one of the laws where we're in alignment. I spoke on this a lot at acceleration days when we're in alignment and we hold each other accountable. That's incredible. And that's where, that's where it, like it really works. And that's where you know, some of your, your, you know, spousal or, or partner relationships and girlfriends, boyfriends, marriage, whatever it is, like, that's where we really have bliss when we can get in alignment and then hold ourselves accountable to that alignment. Your team craves this, you crave this. And don't think that you can't be held accountable to people that report to you. Right. That's one of the things that I've talked about before. Who do you report to? I report both down like, okay, I'm the founder and CEO, Christy and I have co Founded this organization. I'm the current CEO of this business. I've got a president, I've got an ops director, I've got a lead coach, I've got a general manager on the elite buy side, our vendor partner program. Like, I've got a lot of people that report up the org chart. We'll say, right, they go through their boxes and they kind of report up the org chart. But what people forget is I report down the org chart too. And everybody that reports to me all the way through the business, I report back to them as well. And here's what I'll give you as a caveat. And this is why some long term relationships ended in my life. I made a conscious choice that I will not report to anybody that does not support me. Let me say that again. I refuse to report to someone who does not support me. Think about that. And it's probably one of those reasons why for me, I had to become an entrepreneur because I didn't feel supported in the military. I didn't feel supported in jobs that I had. If I would have had great bosses, I probably never would have became an entrepreneur. And the key is now for me that I hope I'm a great boss. I do my best to be a great boss, but I report down the chain all the time. I report to my executive team, I report to my lead coach. I report to the people that are in my life. I report to my clients. Like I'm held accountable by my clients for my clients. So this is a big one. Don't let this land on deaf ears. Don't think accountability is this thing that, oh, you hired me or you know, I hired you and I'm going to hold you accountable or in coaching, you know, you, you, you hired me and I'm gonna, I'm here to bust your time. No, no, no, no. We're getting it all wrong, my friend. Accountability is an amazing thing. Let's get in alignment and let's rock it. Number four, recognition and reward. I talked about this last week when I was talking about up leveling meaning in leadership. And now if we're enhancing the value of our relationship currency, recognition and reward. You know when you're telling people that they're doing well when they're doing well, when you tell people that, you know, okay, you might have screwed this up a little bit, but hey, that's okay, you got in the game, you did your best, you're continuing to learn and grow. Like, you know, we follow up accountability with definitely high levels of, of recognition. And reward. We all need this. I told the story last week about my builder. Like, we all want this, this validation. We want to feel like we're doing a good job. You know, everybody, like, everybody. A lot of people are complaining about the, you know, the participation, awards and the different things that happen throughout our, our current culture of children and different things like that. It's because everybody wants recognition. You and I might have come up in a, in a time when. Excuse me. We got recognized for performance. Actually, we got recognized either way. We got recognized for good performance and we got recognized for bad performance, right? So we got recognized both ways. But now you get recognized in different ways. And I want you, it's your, you're the leader, so you get to decide how it goes. I'm telling you, you've got to create recognition and reinforce those positive behaviors and you'll up level the currency of this relationship. Just be mindful of it. Don't take stuff for granted. Help people see how far they come. Help recognize their effort, even if they're not quite on point or doing it exactly how you want it done yet. Recognize progress. What am I going to say right now? Progress over. Say it after me. That's right. Perfection. Progress over perfection all the time. Recognize the progress. And number five, looking for development opportunities within, within the relationship. So the lovely Christy and I, we have a standing weekly meeting. We meet once a quarter after I, I go to a coaching event and I come back and we review my notes and there's always things in there. Personally, our relationship, how are we going to uplevel, how are we going to develop new opportunities in our relationship where we have kind of gotten, you know, stagnant or maybe we didn't focus on things because there's all these other things going on. No, we want to, we want to make sure we do this, you know, like, so we're gonna, we're gonna see all the national parks throughout the United States. And so we, we have a list and we, you know, I don't know, we're in 26 or something like that. We've, we've hit a good chunk of them. But I, I was at a coaching event that I, I came back from and I told her, I'm like, let's get our next five on the calendar. Let's figure out, like, we're doing two, you know, we actually, we, we, we recently got two in. And then we're gonna, we've got two more that we're looking at coming up on. And those things don't happen if we don't focus on them. That's just a personal thing. How about in the business realm? In the business relationship with Chris and I, my president and I, we're always looking at how can we develop each other, how can we develop the rest of the team, how do we continue to look every level in the organization be looking for these development opportunities, Increasing value of the currency of the relationship. That's what I want you to focus on five things. Active listening or productive listening. Consistent communication. Not just communicating accountability in a different way. Focus on that aligned accountability, recognition and reward and looking for development opportunities. You focus on these, my friend, things will continue to grow, continue to get better. That's your shot in the arm for the week. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. Episode 165 this week, increasing value of relationship currency. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so honored to spend this time with you. Make it a better than fantastic week. Kick this episode to somebody. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.