The man who knew everyone

I was wandering around a conference a few years ago with a good friend of mine from Sweden. I won't embarrass him by naming him, although anyone who knows him will probably recognise the description immediately, because he seemed to know everyone.

A wave to someone over there. A handshake with someone over here. A nod to somebody on the other side of the hall. An introduction, mid-stride, to a person wandering past with a plate of cheese whom he also happened to know. I must declare I never eat out in public at these sorts of events – nothing more challenging that holding a plate of food whilst trying to shake hands and talk to someone.

Anyhow, he moved through the place with the calm air and poise of someone walking around his own home, except that his home, at least here, contained several hundred professionals and a rather large amount of cheese and posh salad.

What struck me wasn't simply that he knew a lot of people. It was that he had time for them. He was rarely out of contract as a consultant, invited to more or less every event in the industry, and constantly seemed to know what was happening, who was doing what, who might be useful to whom and where something interesting was about to happen.

He was, and still is, a remarkable builder of relationships.

I'd always thought of relationships as something slightly adjacent to work. Important, obviously. Pleasant if you meet the right people. Useful at conferences, gatherings and meetups. The sort of thing that people with naturally sociable personalities were annoyingly better at than me. Or, something you did just because you wanted something in return – and that always put me on guard.

Watching him changed my mind though. He wasn't collecting contacts. He was building a network of people who knew one another, trusted one another, enjoyed one another's company and were willing, when the moment came, to help one another.

That is a rather different proposition. And the same thing applies in our workplaces.

We don't build relationships with organisations. We build them with people. The person sitting across the desk. The person on the other side of the project. The person next to you in the hot-desk space. The person in another department whose name keeps appearing in meetings – in a good way I might add. The person who knows someone who knows the thing you need to know.

The organisation may provide the building, the email address and the Teams account but the work always travels between people. And once you start looking at work this way, relationships become rather more interesting.

A good relationship makes things possible. You can ask a question without first constructing the perfect question – a wobbly, unsure one can still land. You can admit that you don't know something without your name being written down in a little book. You can disagree without having to win the argument. You can call someone when an idea is half-formed because you know they won't immediately ask for the PowerPoint, the milestones and the Gantt chart.

You can say, "I've got a strange thought. Tell me if this is nonsense." That sentence is remarkably valuable in a business because a lot of useful ideas often begin there.

Relationships also make communication move differently, and often better.

In formal systems, communication tends to be turned into "information". It then has a tendency to become an artefact passed from place to place, through the hierarchy and through official sanctioned channels, sometimes losing a staggering amount of meaning through the interpretation as it goes. It gets turned into a document, a ticket, a report, a wonderful presentation with nice fonts, a beautifully colour-coded spreadsheet, sometimes arriving where it needs to go where very little understanding then happens.

All of those things have their place. But some of the most useful information in any organisation is still passed from person to person through effective communication.

"Have you spoken to Sarah?"
"No."
"Talk to Sarah. She knows what's really going on."

That isn't a process failure. It is a network working exactly as it should.

The same is true of ideas.

An idea rarely arrives fully formed, complete with a little name badge that says This is going to be valuable. It tends to wander around between people. Someone mentions something over coffee. Someone else adds a thought. A third person knows about a completely unrelated thing that might actually, in light of this conversation, be related. Six months later, something exists that nobody could quite have described at the beginning on their own.

This is one of the reasons apparently unproductive moments at work tend to be so productive. The conversation by the kettle. The coffee and nice biscuits before the meeting. The person you bump into in the corridor and discover is wrestling with exactly the problem you've been wrestling with. The rather nice Chablis in the Crown and Anchor after work. The five minutes before everyone starts talking about the agenda.

We are rather fond of removing these things because they are difficult to measure and seem inefficient. But their lack of measurement is not evidence of their lack of value. Sometimes the very thing you cannot put on a time sheet is precisely the thing that makes the thing on the time sheet possible at all.

Remote work has made this rather interesting. We have gained a lovely amount of freedom, and I wouldn't trade that away. But we've also discovered what happens when many of the accidental encounters of working life disappear.

Conversations become calendar invitations. Introductions become agenda items. The person you would once have bumped into now requires a reason for the meeting because their calendar is full of other stuff.

The answer isn't to go back to the office if that's not your thing right now. It is to notice what those accidents were doing for us and reclaim some aspect of them. Connection doesn't have to mean being in the same room but it does mean making space for people to encounter one another without every interaction having to justify its existence in advance.

My Swedish friend, I realised, had always been very good at this. He created encounters. He remembered people, and their name. And their kid's names. And what they wanted to achieve in life. He introduced people. He paid attention.

And perhaps the most powerful part of that is the attention.

Listening is one of the simplest ways of complimenting the other person. It shows that they matter. It also has an interesting side effect if you let it: you tend to learn things. Real listening isn't waiting patiently for your turn to speak. It is being sufficiently interested in another person's experience that you are prepared to discover something you didn't already know.

That sounds obvious. It is also surprisingly rare.

And when people feel genuinely listened to, they tend to tell you better things. The problem they've spotted but haven't yet reported officially because they're not entirely sure about it yet. The idea they've been holding but weren't sure was worth mentioning. The thing they've noticed that doesn't quite make sense. The ability they have but haven't had an opportunity to use. The ambition they have but haven't worked out how to explain yet.

This is another reason people are always considerably bigger than the jobs they happen to be doing. A job description is a tiny document. A person is not. They are broad, complex, vastly interesting. I once worked with a coach who was also a gifted graphic designer. I didn't know for quite a while, not until we'd built a stronger relationship. It wasn't particularly relevant to his job, and nobody had thought to ask.

Eventually the subject came up. Once we knew, we could make use of it and he wanted to bring it. He got to do more of something he was good at and enjoyed; graphic design. The team gained a capability it hadn't known it had. The work became better.

Nothing had been recruited. Nothing had been bought. We had simply discovered something that was already there.

This is one of the lovely things about knowing people properly. You find things. You get to meet the more complex version of someone else. And the things you find can be surprisingly wonderful.

Relationships also have an interesting, if not slightly frustrating, relationship with time. They don't always pay back immediately. In fact, they often don't. You can spend years knowing somebody without anything particularly consequential happening. You have conversations. You help each other occasionally. You send the odd message and stay in touch. You introduce them to someone. You remember their name.

Then, years later, something happens. They call. Or you call them. A former colleague recommends you. Someone remembers a conversation that leads to a new opportunity. Another opportunity travels through a person you met five years ago. An introduction leads somewhere unexpected.

It looks like luck from the outside. Usually it isn't. It is accumulated attention directed towards strong relationships.

This is what I eventually understood about my Swedish friend.

He wasn't lucky. He wasn't simply charming. It wasn't because he was sartorially elegant – although he was, and that does help. It's mostly because he had been paying attention to people for twenty years.

By the time I saw him moving around that conference hall, I was looking at the accumulated return on all that attention. The handshakes were the visible bit. The head nods were the continuation of an informal connection. But the real work had happened long before, over time.

And there is something wonderfully democratic about all of this. You don't need a particular job title to build good relationships. You don't need to be charismatic, although relationships are formed through effective communication behaviours.

You don't need to become the sort of person who enjoys networking, which is fortunate because networking is one of those creepy words. It tends to turn a very pleasant human activity into something akin to a trade fair. You don't have to be smarmy or slick at pushing your business cards to others either.

You can simply be interested in people. Ask good questions about who they are and what their goals are. Listen properly and pay attention. Remember things, like their name as a minimum. Make introductions between people you know. Help others when you can. Tell somebody about the opportunity that isn't right for you but might be perfect for them.

Keep in touch with people after the meeting is over. Notice what somebody is good at. Give an idea somewhere to go. Speak to people with no hidden agenda.

If you do these things for long enough, something interesting happens. You stop having a collection of contacts and start having a community. That community becomes a sort of invisible infrastructure and network around you and your work.

It helps information travel. It helps ideas develop. It helps problems surface. It helps people find one another. It creates opportunities that no plan could have predicted. And sometimes, when you're stuck, somebody appears who knows exactly what you need to know.

I've spent a lot of my career thinking about systems, structures, processes and ways of making work better. I still think all of those things matter. But increasingly I think about what runs between them.

People. Conversations. Trust. Curiosity. Attention. Communication. It's why the communication layer in the Idea to Value system is called wiring – it pulls all of it, and all of the people, together.

These are the remarkably little exchanges that don't look like work until you notice how much work depends upon them. Relationships are not the soft stuff surrounding the serious business of making money and shipping things. They are one of the ways serious business happens. They are the wiring between the boxes, the functions, the people and the value being generated.

And perhaps the best thing about them is that you don't have to wait for an organisation to give you permission to build them. You can start at the next coffee. You can start with the person sitting beside you. You can start by asking a better question. Or simply by remembering their name.

And when I saw my Swedish friend at this conference, I watched him do exactly what he'd always done. Wave. Handshake. Hug. Nod. Introduce. Listen. Converse.

And then he spotted somebody else across the room. He wrapped up the conversation and off he went.

There was, I realised, nothing mysterious about it. He was simply still paying attention. Which is what I will do, after I find somewhere quiet, peaceful and away from others to eat this cheese.