The Golden Years – Managing Relationships (II)

Last week, we introduced the concept of relationship management, its importance in all stages of our lives, the features of healthy relationships, and how to nurture existing relationships. Today, we will take up building and growing new relationships. Building and growing new relationships: Building relationships should be a deliberate activity in terms of what we […]

Last week, we introduced the concept of relationship management, its importance in all stages of our lives, the features of healthy relationships, and how to nurture existing relationships. Today, we will take up building and growing new relationships.

Building and growing new relationships: Building relationships should be a deliberate activity in terms of what we think and what we do. Obviously, there are different types of relationships requiring different initiation, development and management processes. For instance, the way childhood friendships start out and evolve is fundamentally different from how relationships with colleagues at work or with business associates start out and evolve. Similarly, and quite importantly, the scope, expectations, rights, privileges and responsibilities are different. However, irrespective of the type of relationship, there are common ways of building and growing them, as follows:

First, you don’t have to wait until you retire! At the initial stages of our lives, our relationships revolve around our family members and neighbourhood friends that we grew up and attended schools with. Obviously, these are quite core but as as we take on our career paths, along with burgeoning responsibilities, we have to begin to deliberately build wider relationships. The earlier we can begin to create good relationships, the better our future likely be. As we go through that though, we should do the best within what we need, what we can handle and what makes us happy. I suggest a few things:

Begin early to build a network of reliable relationships in your professional and private lives.

Be of value to those you are building relationships with. As mentioned earlier, we can be of value to others in many simple ways. We can even create our own legitimate value models in not necessarily the common ways we are traditionally accustomed to.

Engage more than superficially and be interested in those you relate with.

Be fair, sincere and honourable in everything you say and do within your relationships.

• Retirement planning – ‘The Big Day’
• Trade Union leaders don’t retire – Comrade Hassan Sunmonu (former NLC President)

I think General Ibrahim Babangida is an excellent example of a person that was very strategic in building relationships with others from his young days in Minna, Government College Bida, through his military training at the NMTC, career and into retirement. He built deep relationships with his childhood friends, seniors, colleagues and juniors in the military as well as civilians in the public sector, private sector, academia, traditional institutions, etc. All these put him in good stead in everything he did and still does. Into his eighties now, General Babangida remains keenly interested and involved in the affairs of the people he relates with regardless of their stations in life. He is valuable to them and benefits from them as well. Successful relationships like General Babangida’s are the result of foresight, interest, value, consistency, loyalty and stamina. 

Second, create new relationships: By the time they retire, chances are that many people have built most of the relationships they may need for life. But that does not in any way suggest that we can’t build new and more relationships. In fact, depending on when we retire and what we decide to do in retirement, we may by desire and necessity have a need to build new and more relationships. And this is very fine as long as we leverage our experiences, are selective, and do it right and well.

If we are building a new business and formal relationship, it is important that each party honours whatever agreements you may have on whatever you want to do. You may not necessarily be interested in the other person’s personal or social life, unless that may impact on their capacity to meet up with your agreements. Of course, though, a reasonable dose of social congruence between parties can strengthen business relationships, but it is by no means necessary and in some situations, may even be undesirable. On the other hand, some new relationships are social. If the relationship is essentially social, its scope will determine the type and level of engagement. For instance, the type and level of engagement with your childhood friends may differ from those with members of your sports club associations.

To build business relationships, attend trade fairs, business conferences, etc. that may be related to what you do or want to do.

For social relationships, attend community gatherings, join a club that interests you, honour invites for decent events, etc.

As we retire, we are likely to uncover past relationships that were frozen in time and space. We had probably relocated elsewhere after school to pursue our careers. Our short weekend visits and annual vacations were, perhaps, not enough to sustain those relationships. It can help to give life back to such relationships when we retire to our home base. In so doing, however, we need to tread carefully, making sure that the innocent person we left forty years ago is still as innocent. We can do this by taking incremental steps to get to update each other gradually and eventually rebuild trust and confidence.

Irrespective of whether we are building early-career or retirement relationships, we should go about them in a way that we stand a good chance of making them healthy, lasting, beneficial and fun. We should enjoy people, connect with them, give them quality time, and be focused and interested in them.  We should pay attention to the people we relate with; positively challenge each other to be better and do more, and appreciate and back each other. We should also understand and respect relationship boundaries and what we may or may not do within them.

Next week, we will take up difficult relationships and how to handle them.