Whatever business you’re in, success often depends on relationships―whether the relationship is between two team members, among several divisions of a corporation, or when it spans a large network of suppliers and customers.
Your ability as a leader to develop powerful relationships - both within your company and with those outside it - will be fundamental to your success. Although all the keys are important, you have three additional unique relationship challenges as a leader.
Focus on three significant relationship challenges that are critical to your success:
1. Staying true to yourself
2. Managing multiple types of relationships
3. Installing a culture that promotes powerful business relationships
As a business leader, you depend on relationships to get most of your work done and you face some unique relationship challenges.
‘Five Keys to Powerful Business Relationships’ is a game-changing guide that will help you leverage every critical relationship in your business for greater success. The authors combine their knowledge and experience to show you how to get maximum value from virtually every relationship―both internal and external.
You’ll learn how to spot those relationships that are not generating their full power―and turn them into drivers of profit and growth. You’ll discover new ways to eliminate barriers to performance and boost the energy of individuals, teams, groups, and your organisation as a whole. And you’ll find out how to improve personal and managerial development by using Five Keys to Powerful Business Relationships:
• Key #1: Connect first, then focus on task
• Key #2: Learn by walking in another’s shoes
• Key #3: Whether people trust you is often up to you
• Key #4: Share information to increase your personal power
• Key #5: Manage yourself before you manage others
The authors present proven best practices that individuals and firms can use to form more empowering relationships. They show you how to identify and remove barriers to relationships in your company, whether they are caused by culture, infrastructure, or self-awareness gaps.
If you want to be more productive, effective, and influential, you have to begin thinking in terms of relationships. Globalisation, quality movements, increasing numbers of mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnerships, and the ever increasing impact of social media have made relationships the new business imperative.
Your ability as a leader to create and develop powerful relationships has been and will be fundamental to your success.
The transition from manager to leader is often not an easy one. It requires you to move from the tactical to the strategic and from managing a process to motivating and aligning people around a vision and strategy.
This transition requires new leaders to see themselves differently.
Reference: Sallie Sherman: ‘Five Keys to Powerful Business Relationships: How to Become More Productive, Effective and Influential’. 2013.
