Key Takeaways:

• Helping other people with their agendas can motivate them to help you with yours.
• Look for ways to create economic glue that binds you with other people and helps both of you financially.
• Show some humility—your imperfections can actually help you build better relationships that get results.

We see that powerful professional relationships are often the foundation of the tremendous success that multimillionaires and billionaires achieve. Highly successful and affluent people prove to be quite remarkable at both connecting interpersonally with other people professionally and then motivating those people to help them pursue their goals.

The following seven relationship steps are ones we see being followed consistently by a great many very wealthy professionals. Therefore, we believe that by being aware of these steps—which overlap in some cases—you will be better able to achieve the results you want in your professional or entrepreneurial life.

Step #1: Be passionate. Chances are, you are driven to succeed and you believe in what you are doing—it really matters to you. Well, you need to communicate that enthusiasm to the people with whom you do business. By being passionate about your business day in and day out, you can generate excitement and commitment in others for your continued success.

Demonstrating passion gets other people to want to align themselves with you and your endeavors. Your enthusiasm acts like a magnet—attracting other people and providing a purpose for all involved.

Ask yourself: What is it about your business or other professional endeavors that you are most passionate about? Armed with your answers, consider why you chose those aspects. By thinking through those issues, you will come up with the critical message of enthusiasm you want to communicate to other people.

Step #2: Engage in meaningful dialogue with others. Self-made millionaires and billionaires tend to build strong relationships by engaging other entrepreneurs and professionals (and other people connected to their businesses) in ways that are meant to foster trust and meaningful conversation—not to demonstrate or proclaim their own superiority. To see whether that describes you, ask yourself: When I am in professional situations such as business meetings or negotiations, how much of the meeting is one-sided as opposed to a free sharing of ideas and perspectives?

For very successful professionals, relationship building is not done to impress others. Instead, it’s about helping other people help themselves. Some ways to do this, based on how we see the Super Rich (those people with a net worth of $500 million or more) make it happen, include:

• Be sure all presentations and as many other interactions as possible between you and other professionals are give-and-take conversations. Getting them involved in the process is a very effective way of building relationships.
• Make sure you are focused on the right topics. Conversations are ineffectual unless all parties are interested in what is being discussed.
• Make sure to learn about the other people. The better your understanding of the person or people sitting across from you, the more you are going to be able to build the type of relationship you want.

Step #3: Help other people accomplish their primary goals. By understanding another person’s main agenda—his or her most important priorities—you can think of ways to help that person achieve those goals. Doing so activates the unwritten rule of reciprocity, which says that if you help people, they’ll naturally feel an inclination to help you down the road.

Note: A person’s primary agenda may involve not only a business or professional agenda, but also his or her life. Therefore, it is essential to know what a person wants personally, too. For example, a serious illness in the family will often take precedence over any business matter.

The easiest way to determine someone’s primary agenda is—you guessed it—to ask what it is! Make a habit of conversing with people about their goals and objectives. Ask them periodically and you’ll usually get more and more insights into what motivates them.

Step #4: Focus on providing economic glue. In most business dealings, the aim is to profit. Your ability to help other businesspeople and professionals profit by doing what you need them to do can be an extraordinarily potent way to motivate them. This ties back to helping them achieve their primary agenda, but with a concentration on building a cooperative professional relationship—one in which all those involved benefit financially. This is commonly known as economic glue, because it binds the efforts of two or more people together.

The question you have to answer is this: How can other businesspeople make money by working with me and doing what I want them to do? Once you understand how your respective financial incentives are aligned, you can take steps to make sure everyone involved with you profits because of the relationship.

Step #5: Foster a high degree of trust. Trust among people is instrumental in building commanding professional relationships that lead to actual results. Trust is the perception and sense that other people will be responsive to (and act in accordance with) your wishes and expectations. In business environments, trust is a function of the following:

• Integrity. Your belief that the other person is honest and reliable.
• Capabilities. Your belief that the other person is able to do what needs to be done.
• Responsiveness. Your belief that the other person is attuned and meaningfully committed to your agenda.

Without trust, there can be no commanding professional relationship. That does not mean trust should be given unconditionally—it needs to be developed and expanded on over time to deepen the relationship. But it has to be there.

Step #6: Show your appreciation for people’s constructive efforts. You want to motivate those around you do the best job they possibly can. This, of course, will help you become more and more successful. A powerful way to encourage people is to recognize their contributions and express your appreciation. Some ways to do this include the following:

• Concentrate only on showing your appreciation, not on evaluating the person overall. Whatever problems or issues you might have with the person can wait and be addressed at another time.
• Find people doing a really good job and tell them you see that they are working hard and succeeding. Also, make sure they know you value their efforts.
• Make it personal. One-to-one compliments made directly to the person, or even handwritten notes, are generally much more effective than mass emails and group celebrations.

Step #7: Bond over your imperfections. No one is perfect (or even great) across the board, and no one lacks vulnerabilities. In business, however, there’s an unwritten rule that you should show only your strength—all the time, no matter what.

Bad idea. By sharing how you are imperfect and where you are vulnerable, you can meaningfully enhance the quality of your professional relationships—and potentially generate better outcomes for you and your company.

Important: This doesn’t mean you present yourself as incompetent or ineffectual. Instead, it’s about communicating that there are ways you could benefit by getting help from other people. This will resonate with others, because we all need help but don’t always admit it. Some examples include:

• Apologizing when you made a business mistake that impacted another person.
• Asking for help and advice to deal with a business situation.
• Sharing a business problem and explaining that you are looking for different points of view on it.
• Recognizing the contributions of other people to your success.
• Being able to use self-deprecating humor when you make an error.

Your imperfections humanize you, which helps create better relationships. We are more likely to want to work with people who are highly driven and capable but who also have some humility and self-awareness about their limits. We like to know that people we get involved with have had both peaks and valleys during their journeys. Those are the people who seem most relatable and trustworthy.

Conclusion

Notice anything these steps have in common? Many of them are simple and are common sense—they can be used by just about anyone and don’t require specialized training to learn and implement. The key is that the most successful of your peers out there use them consistently and systematically.

The upshot: You probably know most of the things you need to do to build commanding relationships with other business owners, professionals and your team. Your success in this area will ultimately come down to whether you take action—and close the gap between knowing and doing.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This article was published by the VFO Inner Circle, a global financial concierge group working with affluent individuals and families and is distributed with its permission. Copyright 2022 by AES Nation, LLC.

This report is intended to be used for educational purposes only and does not constitute a solicitation to purchase any security or advisory services. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. An investment in any security involves significant risks and any investment may lose value. Refer to all risk disclosures related to each security product carefully before investing. Homer Smith is an investment advisor representative of konvergent Wealth Partners. konvergent Wealth Partners and Homer Smith are not affiliated with AES Nation, LLC. AES Nation, LLC is the creator and publisher of the VFO Inner Circle Flash Report. Investment advice offered through Integrated Financial Partners, doing business as konvergent wealth partners, a registered investment advisor.