Transactional relationships vs. Emotional relationships
“I’ll get the kettle on and the biscuits ready”, came Chris’ reply on WhatsApp.
I’d just finished a job in Hackney and, with no looming deadlines over me that day, I decided I could walk up to Homerton and pop in to say hello to the gang at Smith + Newton Architects. I’ve known Chris and Dale (the founding Directors) for quite some time and I enjoy photographing their imaginative work. More importantly, though, I enjoy being in their company and catching up over a cuppa.
Chris and Dale are valued clients of mine, but it’s their friendship, their loyalty, their advocacy, their humour, their trust and their willingness to down tools and have a coffee and chat for a couple of hours that I value so much more. And as a result of feeling royally cheered up and happy having sat in the company of two of my favourite designers for a while, I got to thinking about how I ended up getting so lucky with the people that I work with.
Some years ago a difficult situation with a long-standing client presented itself and I discovered very quickly (albeit after we’d worked together for almost two years) what their real attitude towards me was and how important our working relationship was to them.
It left me with a dilemma about how to proceed. Do I put it all to one side, forget about it and carry on (‘business is business’, etc.)? Or do I re-evaluate our relationship and perhaps make the difficult call to end it?
Ultimately, I decided to end the relationship but I did so for one primary reason: I believed it had been made clear to me that our working relationship was based purely on me providing a service to them for as little money as it could possibly cost them. And for some reason that made me feel very uncomfortable.
Over the months following that incident, I spent a lot of time analysing the situation and researching business relationships and why they fail. I wanted to understand why the whole episode left me feeling so shitty.
What I settled on was the fact that I cared about the value my work added to the client, about how well they were doing and how things were going for them, about helping them out and supporting them, about singing their praises away from their presence.
At the same time I had now realised that this wasn’t reciprocal. It was clear now that money was the number one priority. Our relationship was based purely on transaction. And I think that’s what hurt the most; I felt I had ‘given everything’ to show my loyalty, support and encouragement to them as an individual and as a business.
Our values clearly didn’t align and, though I found that out the hard way, I figured at least I’d found that out. And that mattered because now I could do something about the way I operate to protect myself from being in similar positions again, but also (and more crucially) to help me grow my network of clients in a meaningful, values-based way.
Whilst researching the subject I stumbled across the work and ideas of Mike Steib, the former CEO of online art-buying platform Artsy. Mike has written in great detail about growing your network in a way that culminates in fruitful, longer-lasting, emotionally driven connections that have more chance of paying you back in a multitude of ways further down the line.
Mike says, “Your success at building a network is founded on one very important mindset: that you’re doing it based on your desire to know, appreciate and help other people.”
To me this meant developing a client network in a way that mirrored developing a friendship group. Our social friends are the people that know us best. Intimately. They know what makes us laugh, they know when we’re upset, they show up when we need help and advice, they defend us and adovocate for us behind our backs.
I thought about that non-exhaustive set of traits and realised that I could quite reasonably have that in a work sense, too, if I put more energy into building connections with people and less into seeking ‘new leads’ and ‘new clients’. Understanding Mike’s statement helped me to realise I wanted working relationships which were based entirely on emotion and connection, rather than transaction and money.
A bit of further reading led me to a post by Jessica Tietjen on LinkedIn. Jessica is a company CEO and also a public speaker and leadership coach. Her post “Evolving Workplaces: The Truth of Transactional Relationships” talks of the imbalance of power in such business relationships.
It’s the way Jessica strikes clear the fundamental differences between transactional and non-transactional relationships. You can read Jessica’s post here but, to give you a flavour, she says that transactional relationships are typically:
Professional (vs. friendly)
Based on self-interest (vs. mutual interest)
Focused what you get (vs. rather than give)
Understand process (vs. Understand person)
Win conflict (vs. resolve conflict)
Evaluate results (vs. Evaluate how the other feels about results)
I wanted to work more with people that are more like Chris and Dale and not like those in the list above; people that advocate for me like I do them; people that value taking time out to catch up and chat like I do for them; people that seek to meet half way in challenging situations so that the outcome is equal for both of us; people that are interested in me and my work as much as I am in them and theirs.
To build an emotion- and connection-based work relationship you need to think about the grounds upon which you can align with others. You need to understand your own values and translate them into a work context. I spent a lot of time identifying what is important to me and why. I chose to write them down and make them public in the form of my Manifesto. That way I can hold myself accountable for how I work and the decisions I make.
I have always enjoyed reading the info pages on a creative studio’s website. I like to read about a design ethos and the type of work it concerns itself with. But I now pay much more attention to studios (particularly the smaller / start-up / one-man-bands of the world) who are brave enough to put their values front and centre for all to see.
Having a set of values that everyone else can see and that you use as a barometer, I think, should prevent you from working alongside someone who may cause problems for you later on.
At the very least, I expect collaborators (I prefer that word to ‘clients’ to be honest) to generally be a nice, fair human being. It’s the easiest thing to be, but it’s incredible how many people I’ve met that are just simply not nice people when it comes to work or business. Beyond that, I enjoy meeting people who are considerate to the diverse needs of our society, who are loyal, who appreciate a work-life balance, who are curious about how our people, society and our experiences are connected, and who hold sustainbility at the core of the work they do.
Money is important in the sense that it pays our bills and helps us survive. But, based on the emotion-based relationships I now enjoy with all of my collaborators, I believe it shouldn’t necessarily be the driving force behind who you work with.
And so going back to the start of this piece and about how I started wondering how I got so lucky with the people I work with, I don’t think it is luck after all. I actively turned down opportunities because the values don’t align - I decline politely, of course, but I am at a stage in life now where I just want to be happy with and excited about who I work with and the work I’m asked to do.
I want to buy into people and become a valuable part of their process. I want that random text message or phone call just to see how I’m doing and what I’ve been up to. Life throws up far too many challenges in current times and I don’t want or need to add to it with complicated work relationships.
And, if you’re wondering, it was a packet of Custard Creams that Chris got ready.
Smith + Newton Architects’ studio in Homerton