Who will you relate to today?

Earlier, I posed a dilemma: could my world-famous mentor be wrong?

He once said: "Who you relate to is more important than what you do."

But the opposite sounds just as good. What you do is more important than who you relate to.

For instance, when we introduce ourselves to a stranger, we ask, "And what do you do?" Nobody ever asks, "Hi, who do you relate to?" That's weird.

We also spend most of our time thinking of what we do. "What do I do now?" we ask ourselves when we're stuck. Our jobs, career and livelihood revolve around what we do. We don't spend much time thinking about who we relate to.

Furthermore, action matters. "All the best leadership theories are worth nothing without execution," Salleh Tabrani, a top airline executive once told me in an interview. Our actions -- what we do -- give us credibility and identity.

All that is good commonsense.

But Prof. James Houston, my mentor and founder of a renown graduate school of theology, is remarkable for his counterintuitive commonsense.

The quality of our relationships, and the people we relate with, may be more important than the actions and accomplishments we achieve. This dynamic gets more and more important the older we grow and the higher up in leadership we rise.

We've seen Type A managers who work like crazy trying to get things done without caring about people. They may climb the lower rungs doing this, for sure. But it comes at a cost. These managers are usually stressed out, and they stress others out. More importantly, when they rise to the top, their inability to relate with people cripples their ability to get things done.

Ultimately, it's our relationships, not our jobs, that give us our greatest identity. What we do matters a lot, obviously. But one day, when we grow old, what we do will diminish. We retire from work. Our bodies grow frail. At some point we have no choice but to stop defining ourselves by what we do.

That's when it becomes absolutely crucial that we've spent the bulk of our lives focusing on who we relate to.

I see this in Dr Houston's life. In his old age, I see that he is regarded as a mentor and a wise one because of the quality of his relationships, and the people who seek him out, and the people whom he seeks out. His life is rich, full and deep ... thanks to all the relationships he has cultivated intentionally over the years.

In your workplace today: are you mostly preoccupied with all the things you have to do? Or will you rewire your brain to focus on the people you will relate with today?