We provide support for all stages of a developing relationship – from starting out to reaching the relationship’s natural conclusion. We use consultancy and facilitation to inform and guide your development. Our aim is to ensure you have all the right enablers in place to make your relationship thrive.
There are lots of reasons for putting the effort into building strong relationships. Clients do it to achieve better results with strategic suppliers. Suppliers do it to secure long term opportunities. Organisations working in a system do it to pool resources and align activities. The risk of not putting in the effort is that relationships become hard work and deliver poorer outcomes.
Relationship development support
Ensure you are ready to enter a collaborative relationship with other organisations, by helping you to:
- Clarify the outcomes you need, the relationship you want and the investment you are prepared to make in developing it
- Express yourself clearly in procurement or bid documents
- Engage your people to understand this context, the principles of collaboration and how they will contribute
Ensure you select the organisation(s) you are confident will collaborate effectively, by helping you:
- Explore each other’s capabilities and your intent towards each other
- Create mutual understanding of the value and outcomes you need to deliver together
- Listen to the knowledge and ideas of the other organisation(s)
Ensure you create alignment across your organisations, by helping you:
- Ensure senior leaders are aligned and committed to a collaborative way of working
- Confirm that all parties believe their needs will be met and risks or rewards will be shared fairly
- Establish an exit strategy for when the outcomes have been delivered, or if the relationship is no longer meeting mutual needs
- Create plans to develop organisational capability and relationship quality
Ensure you have appropriate plans for integrating and mobilising resources, by helping you:
- Form the senior leadership team, confirm their commitment to delivering outcomes and clarify their role as leaders for collaboration.
- Ensure organisational accountabilities are clear and performance targets are linked to agreed outcomes
- Support senior managers to engage people with the context, develop teams with a shared purpose and an understanding about how they contribute
- Agree the behaviours and attitudes expected for collaboration
Optimise the relationship so you are working together to deliver agreed outcomes and each other’s expectations, by helping you:
- Develop the Leadership Team so they support people to overcome hurdles, maintain their energy and challenge for high performance.
- Ensure sponsors maintain strong relationships across their organisations, influence their home organisation for support and unblock issues.
- Keep performance management and governance practices focused on achieving the outcomes and making timely decisions
- Monitor the quality of the relationship regularly using EQ PartnerLink to identify areas in the relationship that need attention and support through any ‘storming’.
Exit the relationship effectively after completion of agreed commitments, or due to agreed dissolution of the relationship, by helping you:
- Have effective conversations to implement the exit plan, ensure joint liabilities have been met, impact on business continuity addressed and any issues that triggered an unplanned exit resolved fairly
- Capture learning from the relationship
- Ensure appropriate thanks and rewards are received by those who have earned and deserve them, so that personal endings are complete