Business Partners: How to Influence the Relationship

NB: This is a large guide and will take you quite a while to work through all the elements over several weeks.

When I say business partners, I am referring to many different types of relationship, including outsourcing providers, suppliers, and internal teams. In fact, any type of relationship which has many people on each side who have to work together.

These types of relationship are often problematic for a number of reasons…

1. There are so many different people involved.
2. Lines of communication often get tangled, forgotten or frankly, abused.
3. Each team will often have conflicting agendas (we’ll talk about partnerships later).
4. High levels of pressure are exerted on both sides to deliver results.
5. One side is often in a subservient position (despite equal dependency).

A poor relationship is untenable, albeit highly likely. It is untenable because as supply chains become increasingly fragmented, disparate groups of people have to work together more frequently.

Over the years, we have done a lot of work with teams helping them to work better with other teams. This How To Guide will take you through the key ideas we use and give you some exercises to complete along the way too. Its ultimate goal is to help you to dramatically improve the quality of your inter-team relationships.

As with all of our guides, this page is your jumping-off point to the titles and resources you think will be of most use to you.

How to Dramatically Improve Your Business Relationships

Here are the key steps in the process of developing your influence in these important relationships…

Background Reading

Before you rush off into the action, sit back a little while and take a look at these resources to remind you of things you have forgotten, consider things from a new angle, or receive enlightenment.

Resources Building Stronger Relationships. An overview of the key themes essential in all successful many-to-many relationships. Trust and Integrity Made Simple. Understand the difference between these two concepts at the most basic level as you build to the bigger relationships. Trust and Credibility. What to look out for to determine if this theme is healthy within your relationship. Communication and Influence. Some indicators that you’ve got the balance right, or wrong! Problem Solving and Conflict Resolution. When the going gets tough, what processes come into play to keep things moving forward? Building Trust in a New Relationship. Although focused on relationships between individuals, it will be easy for you to expand this process into the myriad of relationships between your two teams.

Research Issues and Problems

Since you are reading this, you must think there is something in your relationship which could be better. Rather than just rely on your own good sense, do a little investigation on how others see it.

Resources Exercise: Quick Quality Analysis of Your Business Relationships. Although it may be obvious which one you need to work on, take a quick run through this exercise before you rush off talking to others. Relationship Theme Indicators. This is a handy summary of the indicators which may be useful to print out and use when talking to stakeholders. Interview Worksheet. Another document you may find useful as you go about your stakeholder interviews (this is a link to the Gautrey Group website). The Collaboration Survey. If appropriate, you might consider using this to provide more analytical data at this stage. Make sure you also complete this attitude exercise — and if you can, do this with your team too!

Analyse Results and Consider Your Options

Once you have collected the data and qualitative information, it is time to start considering what it is saying. Ideally, this should be done with your colleagues and stakeholders so that they can contribute and share responsibility.

Resources Strengthening Trust and Credibility. Unless you have really good scores on this theme, you need to start here. Improving Communication and Balancing Influence. Once you’ve worked on trust, start to improve this area. Try this too soon and you could suffer. Improving Processes for Problem and Conflict Resolution. At the peak of relationship development, establishing clear, agreed processes will usher in a new era of quality and collaboration.

Decide Influencing Goals

When you have decided generally what you want to do to improve the relationship, you may want to define these as specific influencing goals. This is a key stage of the stakeholder influence process and is very pertinent when you are developing business relationships.

To avoid duplication, this has been covered in How to Develop Influencing Goals. For convenience, the main links are given below.

Resources Exploring Influencing Goals. This takes a deeper look at the concept of Influencing Goals. Focus Influencing Goals on Influence. It is useful to be able to distinguish between ordinary business goals and influencing goals. This should help you make that distinction. Choosing the Right Influencing Goal. Some goals are highly suited to the influence process, others not so. This should help to direct you towards the best ones to focus on. Example Influencing Goals. To give you a better idea of what we mean by an influencing goal, take a look at some of these examples. Exercise: Finalising Your Influencing Goal. This will help you to refine your goal and settle on what it is you want to influence. Deepening Influence Goal Specification. Sometimes you need to add further clarity beyond the specification of your goal. This introduces the simple idea of evidence criteria. Pressure Testing Your Influencing Goal. Either do it yourself, or get a friend to really challenge your thinking, and particularly your evidence criteria. But don’t do it all on your own, involve your team too with the whole stakeholder management process.

Making It Happen

By this stage, you should now have a pretty good idea what needs to happen and what you need to influence to build and the relationship. From here, the best place to go to make it happen is becoming better at managing your stakeholders.