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.