Leaders build relationships to help others.

Building a genuine relationship with another person depends on (at least) two things.  The first is seeing the world from another person’s perspective.  The second is thinking about how you can help and collaborate with the other person rather than thinking about what you can get from him or her.  ~Reid Hoffman (co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn)

Maybe what’s most significant about this quote is who said it—the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn.  We seem to live in a world that’s become more focused on the quantity of our “relationships” than on the quality.  One of my favorite television commercials features a young woman, likely in her 20s, feeling sorry for her parents who are Baby Boomers because they have so few “friends” on a social networking site.  While the young woman is sitting, alone, reading someone’s latest nonsensical post, her parents are out having fun and interacting with real people.  (Course, it was their new car that allowed them to have all this fun.)

But I smile each time I see that ad because it does make me wonder if our “relationships” have really become more like “transactions.”  In his book, The Start-up of You, cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, says:

Old-school “networkers” are transactional.  They pursue relationships thinking about what other people can do for them.  And they’ll only network with people when they need something, like a job or new clients.  Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first.  They don’t keep score.  Networkers think it’s important to have a really big address book.  Relationship builders prioritize high-quality relationships over a large number of connections.

Have we gone astray with our approach to relationships?  Using LinkedIn as an example, I periodically get requests to connect with young graduates from my college alma mater.  I’ve never met these young people, or for that matter, have never even heard their name.  Do they want to connect with me because they believe they can help me?  I doubt it.  Or, is the person who just requested to connect with me who already has more than 500 connections (the maximum number that LinkedIn will report) doing so because they believe they can help me?  Unlikely.  To be fair, I have to ask myself, how often have I reached out to someone through social or professional networking because I thought I could help them?

After reading this quote from Hoffman, I thought about a number that tends to stick in my head – the number is 12.  In my own study of how adults learn, I’ve found over and over that the magic number of an adult cohort of students is no more than 12.  When I moderated focus groups years ago, again the ideal number was a minimum of 8 and maximum of 12.  Jesus, one of our ultimate examples of leadership, had 12 disciples.  How many people report to the average CEO, around 10, but not more than 12.  In research on what we would consider traditional “networking,” it was determined that even the jump from 5 to 15 relationships shows a decline in the quality of the relationship. 

I’d assume that Hoffman is happy with how we’ve embraced the use of LinkedIn.  But I do wonder if he also thinks most of us have missed the point of using it as a tool to develop genuine and authentic relationships so we can help one another.  Imagine how leadership development in organizations would be different if each leader focused on 12 really quality relationships, as opposed to viewing the number of relationships they can maintain as a competitive scorecard.