Most companies know more about their customer relationships than they do about the relationships between their own employees.

CRM. Customer intelligence. Relationship intelligence.

There are plenty of solutions designed to help companies understand their customers, share knowledge across the sales organization and find the right paths to that sought-after sale.

We map the customer journey and keep track of every little interaction a customer has with our customer service team and how they use our products. We have systems that can tell us who in the company knows a potential customer best. But ask the same company which relationships support collaboration internally, and the answer becomes much harder.

So why do companies spend astronomical amounts of money understanding and managing their customer relationships? Stupid question. Because it makes financial sense, of course.

But if we look inward, how much do companies and organizations know about the relationships between “their most valuable resources”? In other words, between their own employees?

Not much! In my experience, very little is done to understand this. At best, there may be a few questions about the relationship with your immediate manager in the employee survey.

Now I want to ask an important question. Who do you collaborate with most, your manager or your colleagues?

Having a good relationship with the colleagues you work with every day is important if you are going to do a good job.

Companies would never accept knowing nothing about the relationships with their most important customers. Yet we accept knowing very little about the relationships between the people who are expected to collaborate, solve problems and create results every day.

It’s time to change that.