Not Every Conversation Needs an Outcome

I spend a considerable amount of my working life in meetings.

Meetings with members, government representatives, industry leaders, potential sponsors, business owners and people who have ideas about what we should be doing next.

Some of those meetings are carefully planned, with clear objectives and an agenda. Others are simply opportunities to have a conversation, build a relationship or understand another person's perspective.

And occasionally, I come away wondering whether anything was actually achieved.

Earlier this year, I spent a day in Brisbane moving between meetings. I had breakfast with a potential sponsor, met with government representatives, discussed a possible training opportunity over lunch and had another conversation about a potential partnership.

One meeting resulted in a sponsorship commitment, which was an excellent outcome. Another made it reasonably clear that a partnership was unlikely in the immediate future. The others were somewhere in between.

By conventional measures, I suppose you could say some meetings were more successful than others.

But I came away feeling that the entire day had been worthwhile.

The conversations had opened opportunities, strengthened relationships and helped me better understand what was happening across the industry.

Not everything had resulted in an agreement, a decision or a commitment.

And I was quite comfortable with that.

It did make me wonder, though, whether we've become so focused on achieving outcomes that we've started measuring the value of our professional relationships by what they produce, rather than the relationships themselves.

When did relationships become transactions?

We have become very good at measuring outcomes.

In business, we measure revenue, profitability, customer acquisition and return on investment. In associations, we measure membership growth, engagement, attendance, sponsorship and advocacy outcomes.

All perfectly reasonable things to measure. I am responsible for managing an organisation, and I take that accountability seriously.

But I wonder whether we've started applying the same thinking to our relationships.

We attend a conference and assess its success by the number of contacts we made. We arrange a meeting and ask what business might come from it. We invest time in building a relationship and eventually start questioning whether it is delivering sufficient value.

I understand the thinking. Time is valuable, and none of us has an unlimited supply of it.

But there is a difference between being intentional about how we spend our time and being transactional about the people we spend it with.

Not every person we meet needs to become a customer, sponsor, member or business partner.

And not every relationship needs to produce something measurable to be worthwhile.

Relationships beyond agreement

During another trip earlier this year, I had dinner with someone from the surveying profession whose views about the direction of our industry don't necessarily align with mine.

It was a perfectly pleasant evening.

We talked about the profession, the challenges facing our industry and some of the things happening across the country.

I came away recognising that the relationship might never lead to anything particularly significant from an organisational perspective.

And that was fine.

I had enjoyed the conversation, understood his perspective a little better and hopefully given him a better understanding of mine.

That has value.

As an association executive, I work with people and organisations who frequently have different interests, priorities and opinions. Sometimes those interests align beautifully. Sometimes they don't.

If I only maintained relationships with people who agreed with me, I would have a considerably shorter contact list!

More importantly, I would probably be considerably less effective at my job.

Leadership requires us to work with people whose perspectives are different from our own. It requires us to listen, understand competing interests and occasionally find common ground where none seemed to exist.

We cannot do that particularly well if every conversation begins with an expectation of what we might gain from it.

Sometimes listening is the most useful thing we can do.

And sometimes maintaining a respectful relationship, even when we disagree, is an achievement in itself.

Being intentional without becoming transactional

Of course, there is another side to this.

Relationships require time, and sometimes money. Both are finite.

There are conferences I would like to attend, people I would like to meet and opportunities I would genuinely enjoy pursuing. But organisational resources are not unlimited, and neither is my personal capacity.

As a leader, I have a responsibility to make sensible decisions about where I invest both.

That means recognising that not every invitation needs to be accepted and not every opportunity needs to be pursued.

But being selective about how we spend our time doesn't mean we need to become transactional about the people we spend it with.

I think this distinction becomes particularly important as we become more experienced.

Earlier in our careers, there can be considerable pressure to build networks, make connections and pursue opportunities. We are encouraged to think strategically about who we know and how those relationships might help us progress.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

But after more than thirty years of working with people, I'm increasingly interested in what I can contribute to those relationships rather than simply what might come from them.

Can I connect someone with an opportunity? Share something I've learnt? Offer encouragement? Help someone see a situation from another perspective?

Sometimes the contribution is small. Sometimes we may never know whether it made any difference.

And that's okay.

What makes a conversation worthwhile?

Which brings me back to that day in Brisbane.

By the end of it, I had one clear commercial outcome, several useful discussions and at least one opportunity that was unlikely to progress.

If I had approached every conversation expecting a return on the time invested, I might have been disappointed.

Instead, I came away feeling that the day had been worthwhile.

I had learnt something. I'd strengthened existing relationships and developed some new ones. I'd had conversations with people whose interests and perspectives were different from mine.

And hopefully, I'd contributed something useful to them as well.

I still believe we need to be clear about why we're having meetings and what we're trying to achieve. There are already enough meetings in the world without adding more for the sake of it.

But perhaps we need to broaden our understanding of what a successful conversation looks like.

So, the next time you finish a meeting without a decision, an agreement or something to add to your list of achievements, don't be too quick to dismiss it.

Ask yourself what you learnt. Whether you understood someone a little better. Whether trust was strengthened. And perhaps, most importantly, whether you contributed something worthwhile to the person sitting across from you.

Because not every conversation needs to lead somewhere else to have been worth having.

Sometimes the conversation itself is enough.