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