On yesterday’s Guest Conversation for our Silver members of the Remarkable Leadership Learning System, I had the pleasure of talking with Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents. Our members are focusing on the leaders role (and the skill of) nurturing relationships.
While nurturing relationships was the nominal topic, I knew that Julien would bring a fresh perspective to the conversation. Which he did. It felt like a conversation mashup – like when different web tools are brought together to create something completely new – and cool. (Ok that is my definition of a mashup, here is Wikipedia’s).
He brought a web and social media sensibility to our conversation about our role as a leader. Here is just one idea I took from our conversation.
He talked about how we can use Facebook, and Twitter, et al to “remind people they are being thought about”. With these tools we can send a note to their wall, reply to a tweet or retweet then comment.
As leaders we need to do the same thing – we eed let people know we are thinking about them, that we care. We can do that by stopping by their desk, talking about the game they care about, sharing an article with them or 100 other ways.
The coolness of our conversation points to another important point. We will often get the best ideas by putting together things that are a perfect match: people or situations from different industries, disparate concepts, etc.
Now let’s mash all of this together. Imagine a gathering where people from different parts of your network (or if you want to play it safe, different parts of your company) come together. You’ve invited them to gather because you care about them, you want the to expand their network and you want to get their ideas on a challenge or opportunity. Rather than making it a simple brainstorming session, make it a network expanding, relationship nurturing idea-palooza.
This type of event and idea only comes from a leader.Look in the mirror, you are one.
Perhaps this idea doesn’t connect for you. That is ok. Your leadership activity for today is to find one idea in this post, and take one action to nurture a relationship around you.
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