Two important concepts for managing and maintaining healthy relationships in business.
By: Jaice De Celis
Tags: Growth, Connection, Relationships, Business Advice

One thing that always manages to wiggle its way between even the strongest bonds is business. Far too often a father and son go into business, things start to pick up and then boom, they stop talking. They both felt like they were doing everything for the business and they both thought that they deserved more.

What do you think the issue was?

If you said communication than you are absolutely right. One of the most important and hard to teach skills is communication. It requires both parties to participate which can often times be the biggest struggle in building and maintaining business relationships. Let’s take a step back and analyze from macro perspective what exactly a business relationship is so that we can better understand how to nurture one.

Key Components of a Business Relationship:

Open and Consistent Communication Equivalent Morality and Mission

This may seem like common sense at this point but you would be surprised how often you would be mistaken. In order to better understand each component let’s take a closer look.

Open and Consistent Communication

This one is by far the most important and although previously mentioned already, I would like to offer a few pointers that I have learned from my mentor as well as my personal experience.

When dealing with a potential partner, mentor or connection, you need to focus on listening. The best thing you can do for building a relationship of any kind, whether it be at home with your spouse and children or in the office, is to listen. Listening allows you to respond appropriately and instills in the other half that you care.

People are inherently drawn to things that they are interested in or that take interest in them. This means that just by listening you are automatically on your way to being respected by that person. As I have gotten older I have started to shift my approach from leading the conversation to following the conversation and I have noticed that my time communicating bears far greater fruit now.

Focus on keeping an open line of communication between you and anyone you would like to connect with. Allowing an open line of communication will keep a relationship fresh and exciting and will keep you on the front of your connections mind.

Equivalent Morality and Mission

Communication is incredibly important but so is knowing when to stop. When you are first getting to know a new connection, it is very easy to be excited and allow yourself to enter what I call the honeymoon phase. This doesn’t mean that you are falling head over heals for someone, what it does mean is that because the connection is fresh and new, you are going to be heavily attracted to the idea of expanding said connection.

The issue here is that the honeymoon phase can often times keep you from thinking critically and can lead to long term issues.

A quality of every leader that I have ever met is the ability to cut people off. This can be hard but as you get to know someone and better understand their morality and mission it is important that if they do not line up with what you find moral and just, then you must sever the connection.

This may sound harsh but look at it this way. If you are in business and you have spent any amount of time developing connections with someone who is working for a cause opposite yours, you will slowly start to realize that one of you is bleeding into the other. Humans by nature assimilate into their surroundings and when you surround yourself with people who fight for a different cause, it can start to steer you off course without you even realizing.

It is important to be able to analyze your connections and decipher whether or not that relationship is either A) with someone who is on the same page from a morality and mission perspective or B) is just an acquaintance.

Remember to separate these relationships so that you can remain consistent and on course.

I also enjoy sharing my business experience and advice on Quora, you can find me there at /jaice-de-celis-3 to read more about businesses I have started and sold in the past as well as simple insight into my life.