How to Build Meaningful Relationships

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business team or new product. Today, I'm talking about my playbook for building dozens of meaningful relationships over six years of building a business. Let's hop into it. Something I've realized about myself is that I tend to overvalue the things that I'm not great at and I undervalue the things that I am great at.

And this is something that most of us probably do. Our brains always default to focusing on where the grass is greener. For me, that's saying, "Oh, that person is an incredible technical founder" or, "Oh, that person is wildly focused and efficient in the way that they work, why can't I be that way?" And at the same time, we ignore the thing that we're great at because it's so innate to our being that we don't realize that it's unique or valuable to other people. For me, one of those traits is relationship building. I have always been a relationship builder and I'm really good at it. Now, I don't say that to brag or flex my network, but honestly, because I never give myself credit for that being a superpower of mine, I forget that it's an incredibly important quality to have in work and in life.

And because it doesn't feel like a hard skill like product management or engineering or financial modeling, I fail to acknowledge that it's a strength of mine. You know, I was talking to the team about it before this. I even think that oftentimes a relationship and networking can feel like a crutch. It can feel like almost an excuse for not being good at other things. I almost worry that other people will say, "Oh, Alex is a good relationship builder, and that masks him not actually being good at doing the work or building a business." But in reality, I have learned in business that who you know, truly is as important as what you know, and it's not just some dated cliche.

And even better being good at who you know, isn't just an art form that you're born with or you're not born with, it is a skill that can be developed intentionally over time. So in an effort to help you build deep, meaningful relationships relatively quickly in your career, I went through an exercise. And in this exercise, I reflected on dozens of my closest professional relationships, and I asked myself, what are the patterns between all of these connections that have allowed me to build such strong relationships? What this is not is a checklist of things that I am literally actively thinking of as I'm spending time with my close connections.

It's more of a reflection of the things that I think helped me build these relationships in the first place. So what I'm going to do now is share the most important traits and skills that any of us can develop to become great, authentic relationship builders. 

Trait #1: Lead with Curiosity

Number one: lead with curiosity. My MO in every new relationship I'm building is to let my curiosity lead. What does that mean? I am personally fascinated by people's stories and how we as humans think. Every time I'm doing work at a coffee shop or sitting in a high traffic place like an airport, I can't help but think to myself how small each one of us is in the context of nearly 8 billion people on this planet, but also how cool it is to look at these people and know that they have such complicated stories that they're living in parallel with me and everyone else.

I bring that same curiosity to my relationships and that curiosity is such a powerful thing for building deep, meaningful relationships quickly, because it allows me to maximize the time that I spend with someone, truly getting to know them in a way that doesn't feel transactional. And also we, as people love talking about ourselves, it's just how we operate. So, when I'm in curiosity mode, I'm giving someone airtime to tell their story, and honestly, that makes me more of a magnet for them to come back to in the future because they liked how they felt when they told me about themselves. So leading with curiosity allows me to maximize my time and it makes the person I'm talking to feel really good.

Trait #2: Don’t Talk About Stupid Shit

The second important trait to building meaningful relationships: don't talk about stupid shit. When I'm talking to someone when I'm building a new relationship, I try to avoid surface level conversation, I try to avoid gossip, I just try to avoid shit that doesn't matter. What I'm not saying is that every word out of my mouth has to be a deep or intense, but think about how is this conversation driving the goal of any new relationship. And for me, the goal of any new relationship is both to enjoy the experience of getting to meet someone new and learning their story to know if this is someone that I want to spend more time with.

Trait #3: Vulnerability Begets Vulnerability

Number three: vulnerability begets vulnerability. This to me is the one-two punch to not talking about stupid shit. If my goal is to really understand who someone is, what motivates them, the things that matter to them most in life, the challenges that they're facing, it requires them to open up. But never in early conversations or early relationships do I expect someone to initiate vulnerable conversation. I don't think that's the right expectation. And so what I try to do is always lead by example. I open up, I share with others answers to the questions that I want to get to know about them. I tell them my story with Morning Brew, I talk about my journey with anxiety and OCD, I talk about getting bullied in middle school, I talk about my recent decision to move in with my girlfriend, I talk about the passing of my dad.

And no, I don't throw that all on someone immediately, but this is who I am. This is the shit that actually matters to me in the context of my life. If I'm going to build a relationship with someone, I want them to know the stuff that matters to me, and in turn, this will open them up to sharing the stuff that matters to them.

Trait #4: Treat Professional Relationships Like Personal Ones

Fourth key trait to building deep, meaningful relationships: treat professional relationships like personal relationships. There's this concept in B2B businesses—business to business businesses—that while your end customer is a business, meaning the person who's paying for your product is a company, not an individual, you're still selling to a human being.

And a human being is deciding to use your product for their business. A human being is the one that's actually going to be using the product within their business when their business pays for it. And so you should build and market a product in B2B that respects the fact that you're still interacting with a consumer, just like any B2C company. And I think it's the same exact analogy for professional relationships. People feel the need to change and professional situations and I don't really get it. Here's how I think about it. I have never met top performers in companies that didn't have a close personal relationship with the people they work alongside or under, and I genuinely believe that the more you treat people you work with, like people who have lives, fears, aspirations, like you, the more that you're going to connect with them.

Trait #5: Validate

Trait number five: validate, validate, validate. At the end of the day, human beings really are so simple. Beyond our physiological needs that sit at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, like shelter, food, water, we look for a few key things. We look for love and connection, and we look for respect and recognition. When we validate people authentically, we are quite literally satisfying some of the most important needs that other humans have in their lives. What I'm not saying is just to throw out compliments for the hell of it. But what I am saying is have the awareness to recognize someone when they deserve recognition or love or praise.

And people have very different ways of doing it. It could be sending someone a text for their birthday, which while it's literally the most simple and basic thing, so many of us forget to do it because we don't go on Facebook anymore to remind us of people's birthdays; it could be a work anniversary or a promotion or a fresh round of funding for an entrepreneur; or it could be something really small, like you're hanging out with someone and that person you're hanging out with says something really nice about someone else you're connected with, and you could just remember to text that person who was complimented later in the day to let them know that they were you acknowledged. It is a basic shit that most people forget to do.

Trait #6: Be Unpredictable

The sixth trait of building deep, meaningful relationships: be unpredictable. The way to stand out and accelerate a relationship is to do what other people won't do. And to me, in the context of relationships, it's showing someone that you're thinking of them when you don't need to be. My way of doing that is using the internet as surface area for serendipity. Obviously, you know, doing founders journal, running a media business, I spend a lot of time reading, watching, and listening. So I use the internet as my tool for showing people that I'm always thinking of them. Whenever I find a piece of content I like, I always ask myself the question who would enjoy this content and who would benefit from this content.

It is such a small and easy thing, but it amplifies the value of the content that I'm consuming because now it turns a totally independent activity into possibly a smart conversation, and it shows the person that I'm reaching out to they're always top of mind for me and I want to add value to them in any way that I can. 

Trait #7: Don’t Always Have an Agenda

And the last trait for building deep, meaningful relationships is to not always have an agenda. In the world of work, it is so easy to have an agenda. And I think about agendas in two ways: a literal agenda, where you have items that you want to talk about, and if you talk about other things, it's a waste of time because it wasn't on that list of items, and then a figurative agenda, where you're going into the conversation with your own personal reasons that the person you're talking to you may or may not know about.

It is inevitable that many of our meetings and conversations in work will have some sort of agenda physical or figurative, and that's okay, but I don't believe you can ever meaningfully build deeper relationships if you exclusively talk with an agenda in place. There needs to be more fluidity and serendipity when you build relationships. Here's a quick example. Some of you may or may not know that Morning Brew was acquired in October of 2020. And while the acquisition itself took almost a year to do, what people don't realize is that relationship, the relationship with Business Insider and some of the key stakeholders who pushed forward this deal, that had been in works for over three years.

When Morning Brew was still in a WeWork space in the Financial District of New York City, I was introduced to, at the time, someone who ran the subscription business for Business Insider, ultimately became the COO of Business Insider, now is running a larger company within the parent of Business Insider, and that relationship started completely organically. There was no thought about acquisition, there was no thought about "How could Morning Brew benefit from Business Insider?" I just wanted to build a deeper connection with someone who I thought shared my values in life and who had a really interesting thoughts on the world of media. You know, I'm sure I could think of more key traits to building meaningful relationships, but I think these are the most important, and if you focus on them, you've got like 95% of effective relationship building covered.

I Want to Hear From You

And again, what I'm not saying is to think of these actively as a checklist while you're hanging out with someone, but more so to revisit them and always have them in the back of your mind as you're looking to build new connections with people during your career. With that, I would love to hear from you. This has been the biggest month of Founder's Journal, and I'm sure next month will be even bigger. And what that means is we have a ton of new listeners, whether you're a new listener or an old listener who's never written in, I would love to meet more members of the Founder's Journal community. Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com Or DM me on Twitter @BusinessBarista and tell me a little bit about yourself, where you live, where you work, why you decided to listen to this podcast, and to add a little bit of extra incentive, if you send a message to me, I will send a funny selfie of myself when I respond to your message.

Thanks so much for listening to Founder's Journal. And if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again. And I'll catch you next episode.