How clear is the way ahead really?

It’s easy to feel that life is settling down again, but it’s an illusion. We want certainty, so we seek to establish it. Yet – the sands are still shifting. Fact. Economic uncertainty and how customers want to buy, to name just two.

In your organisation, how clear is the way forward? Are you operating in this changed world with unchanged ways of working? Do you hear your leaders talk in the same way as they did before the world turned upside down?

The conversations need to change, to get deeper into issues and explore more openly, more robustly. It’s too easy to tackle the change that you can recognise because it relates to something you’re familiar with. If that’s the case, then the change is only superficial and likely to be missing the root change.

To change the conversation, you have to change the relationship. Perhaps keeping relationships the same is something that we cling onto when everything else is changing.

Yet, the relationship is likely to be the key to opening the door to change that is truly affecting. Shifting a relationship can be done while also building and deepening it, with careful positioning.

I’m suggesting a conversation ‘off-line’, out of the course of BAU, with a clear purpose. ‘There’s so much going on right now, and the way we work together is so important to me, I’d like to schedule a meeting with you where we talk about THAT.’

If there are issues, then that stakeholder will be fully aware and want to solve them too, and if the relationship is already effective then you can move it to another level.

This is at the heart of business partnering – raising the level of the relationship so that you can raise the level at which you deliver.

Join us for our next 2-hour virtual workshop on business partnering.