It is all in the Relationship

Why relationship consciousness and relationship intelligence?

There are sound business reasons why relationship consciousness makes good business sense. Poor relationship between directors can damage the financial bottom line of a business because poor relationships affect performance and strategic outcomes.  Psychological research has drawn attention to the following:

• Most of us spend over 95% of our lives interacting with others.
• Over 80% of job terminations are due to poor relationship skills not poor technical skills.
• Creating effective relationships with those you need to get you where you want to be makes good personal, interpersonal and corporate sense

Relationship consciousness and relationship intelligence is important because:

Relationship Consciousness and relationship intelligence is important because a good understanding of the impact of good relationships helps you to:

• Manage conflict with skill
• Build effective relationships and be effective with people at all levels
• Develop inter and intra personal intelligence with Relationship
• Focus on effective team relationships and measurable outcomes
• Be effective with diverse groups of people and cultures
• Increase your understanding and acceptance of others
• Be effective in your personal relationships and preserve that which you value within the relationship
• Today’s global interactions require people in organisations to form relationships, share goals and work collaboratively and corporately to achieve those goals.
• The concept of a team as astatic entity is no longer realistic, teams are a network of interdependent relationships

Building relationship consciousness requires understanding and identifying the key relationships in your business and using practical strategies for leveraging them to improve the business.  Relationship capital with awide range of people is necessary, and specific skills are involved to improvesocial effectiveness.

Follow my blogs on skills to enhancerelationship consciousness, relationship intelligence and relationship capital.

Conflict and Relationship Consciousness

Become conscious of the value of conflict within your relationships. Conflict in Relationship Intelligence may be defined as any experience (or situation) in which you think or feel that you are cut from feeling valued.  In such situations when you are feeling cut off from achieving your self-worth, you will deploy purposeful behaviour to defend your self-worth.

The purpose of you defending your self-worth is to restore your feelings of self-worth (to resume the disposition of your Valued Relating Style).  In this situation the conflict is a vehicle which is intended to remove resistance to getting you to be where you want to be.

For example, A person with Green Relating Style, whose reports are criticised for being excessively detailed may respond in a Red Behaviour(Conflict) Style so that she wins the right to continue producing her detailed style of report in the future.When things are going well, people deploy their behaviour randomly.  When experiencing conflict they deploy their behaviour in a sequence of styles.

An example may be,Red then Blue then finally Green.   The implications of this approach are; each successive style brings on an increase in the urgency to regain self-worth -people can feel stressed in the final stage of conflict.The purpose of behaviour deployed in this example is firstly, to defend ownership of your basic value system and secondly, provided the opposition no longer exists,to bring about a return to the valued relating style. Become more aware of your relating styles and improve your relationships.

Building Relationships

Major success in the 21 century will be marked by the quality of relationships. Relationship with yourself, business relationship with your customers and stakeholders, and personal relationships will all be hallmarks that define your success.

Today I will focus on business relationships. So how much time are you giving to building winning relationships with your clients and customers? Do you have someone in your business who is responsible for ensuring that the relationship with customers and clients is receiving high priority?

How confident are your customers and clients in the knowledge that you will deliver what you said you would deliver regarding the quality of your service or products and at the time you said you would deliver? Do your clients trust you to be consistent with quality?

Trust is the glue of life. It is the founding principle that holds all relationships in harmony. I work with businesses to give good attention to building relationship capital. This requires you as a business owner or entrepreneur to understand and identify the key relationships in your business and use practical strategies to leverage those relationships to improve your business.

Your good relationships with your customers and clients are necessary, as well as your relationships with you staff and other stakeholders people. Specific skills are involved to improve your social effectiveness, skills such developing your awareness of your own values, principles and assumptions.

The degree to which you are aware of your business interactions and social environment is essential. For example, it teaches you when, where and why to have crucial conversations in a variety of situations, such as maintaining quality, addressing performance issues, anticipating and meeting customer needs.

Good relationships embodies effective interpersonal skills such as verbal and non-verbal aspects of personal interactions – the extent to which you are a good listener, your timing and fineness in  to switching topics as well as how you present yourself and your business.

Your business, whatever the size, cannot function without collaborative relationships because relationships provide the context and shape the environment within which you do business.  In building business relationships, your key challenge is to engage the hearts, minds, emotions and the intellects of your people to deliver superior service and business performance.

Business relationships represent a unique strategic resource and you can be taught how achieve excellent business relationships.  The importance of relationships is noted by Gallup – No single factor predicts the productivity of an employee more clearly than his or her relationship with a direct supervisor.

Beacon will coach you and your business to build effective relationships and thus adding profits to the bottom line.

Dr. Neslyn Watson-Druée, CBE