What is a leaderboard doing there?

Happy Tuesday! If randomly clicked your way over here, I send an email once a week exploring how we can leverage our most important asset - relationships - to build strong networks of clients, co-creators, and community.

If you log into Relatable, the personal CRM I launched last year, you’ll see this on the right hand column.

Why does a software product that helps you build and maintain relationships have a leaderboard in it? That’s like going to get your car washed and someone handing you a taco.

Actually that would be awesome. But I digress.

When we choose to dedicate time to nurture relationships with a wide network of past and future clients and collaborators, friends, and other “interesting” people, we have to realize we’re swimming upstream.

We’re naturally wired to optimize for the short term versus the long term. It’s no wonder we would rather eat pizza than a salad, watch Netflix vs work out, and refresh our inbox vs call a past client.

If you want to do things that benefit you in the long term, you need to find the tactics and tricks that help you get past that short term bias.

As a software builder, I’ve had this in mind for a while.

That’s a screenshot of Contactually, our old product. We had the idea of gamification back in 2011, which resulted in us giving you a grade on your relationship health. This naturally caused many (not all) to want to improve their grade instantly, which meant reaching out to their database. I constantly received messages from our users about their own performance.

So in Relatable, we developed a leaderboard, where people compete with each other. How do you earn points? Reaching out to your relationships, adding information about them, recording interactions - the healthy habits we know lead to those long term outcomes we all seek.

Knowing that your own caveperson wiring is working against you, what can you implement today?

Now try this

One near-universal truth is we’re wired for the short term. Another is that we tend to base our actions on what our colleagues are doing.

Just because you saw it mentioned on social media or in a sales meeting doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for you.

Answer these questions:

• What are my goals with my relationships?

• Who am I choosing to stay in touch with? What do they like? What do they need?

• What do I enjoy doing?

• How do I enjoy (or hate) engaging with people?

You will likely come up with a set of activities that differ from others. Some people love sending handwritten cards, some loathe it. Some will surprise their contacts with a gift, others choose to make phone calls. Some love to meet 1:1, while others host cocktail parties.

Find what works for you. The more you it is, the more likely you will do it.

Watch This

As I continue my adventure into video, I posted a video about handwritten cards.

Further Reading

There’s a discussion on last week’s post here, I’d love to get your take.

Until next week!