Video Text: Building Relationships

40% of the leaders fail within the first 18 months and 82% of the time the reason is, what do you think it is? Audience participation.

Communication. What else? Anything beyond communication? How many of you think a relationship is 50-50? Imagine you’re on the opposite side of river and you and the other person want to build a bridge and you go into it with a 50-50 attitude. If either of you slips and makes the slightest mistake, the bridge will never form, the bridge will never form. However, if you go in with a 75 – 75 approach and you have the overlap that’s necessary to form a relationship, your bridge will form. And if you’re in the leadership role or you’re in the role where it’s the your responsibility to make this relationship work, well by all means you need to put in 75%.

No cellphones, no GPS. So I have to get to a phone.  I walk to the road, I see a taxi come, I flag it down Taxi stops. I opened the door, get in and I’m like, now what? No, what do I tell him. I don’t speak his language. But how many times you been in a position where you’re trying to have a relationship with a peer or a family member you don’t speak their language? Or you’re having that job interview and you don’t speak your language? Or, you name it and you don’t speak their language?

A couple more years pass and that’s when i go to Germany and we tour the sites in Bavaria, and we end up having a late lunch and the waitress in a very remote area, she comes up to me and she says in perfect English, I’m sorry I don’t speak English and I reply and not so perfect German, no problem, I speak German I’ll translate for my family. Do you think she treated me differently? Of course she did.