Business Relationships - A Lesson Learned In Building Relationships

If you are in business you will be either marketing through traditional methods or social media or both, either way you run the risk of saying something that people may not like, or choose to take offense at. Now some of these people may be clients, contacts that have opted into your list of even friends; either way there is an important rule in question here about building relationships.

How to build relationships

The way to build rapport and therefore relationship is to respect each others right to have their opinion and their model of the world, I stress the word 'right', because you may choose, as I do to disagree with people from time to time, that is a basic human right. However, I do urge you to allow and respect others to have their right to their opinion, after all this is built from their model of the world, their beliefs, values, experiences and emotions.

We all have to earn the mutual right to do business with each other and also to build friendship and business relationships, so in the unlikely event that you experience a breach of that basic right then we all have the right to chose either to continue or sever that relationship whether it is a business or personal one.

In a business relationship, the client has the right to unsubscribe from your list and you also have the right to delete them, or to choose to business with other people. At a friendship level, now with the explosion of social media it becomes much easier to block and delete people who breach that respect.

A lesson learned

I had this important lesson brought home recently on the biggest social media site in the world, when an old friend, someone with whom I have no business relationship, wrote an inappropriate and abusive reply to one of my posts; well, in my opinion it was inappropriate for me and yes, I do respect his right to have his say.

What to do if people complain?

You will inevitably encounter people who take offense at what you say or may even become abusive. So here is what to do instead:

1. First and foremost, ignore them. they have had their say and you have no obligation to defend your words.
2. Look at your comments and ask "can I learn anything form this"
3. Retain your composure and positive state.
4. Move on and leave the negativity behind.

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