Relational Excellence is a crucial organizational competence and a strategic lever
Most leaders today are participating in or orchestrating complex business ecosystems; new capabilities are required to accomplish objectives through influence of varied stakeholders versus through direct authority and hierarchical power.
"Leadership initiates, regulates and perpetuates organizational realities and designs, for better or worse."
– Danny McCall
"We teach frameworks and strategies in every area of business school, except relationship building, despite the fact that building successful business relationships is foundational to how business must be done today and tomorrow."
– Dr. Sandy Jap,
from "Partnering with the Frenemy"
Strategy Execution
Executives today must rally workers, managers, leaders, and external stakeholders to own and execute the mission and strategy, while contending with complicating factors such as change fatigue, rapidly changing technology, and tensions and disconnects with the workforce. The key to cultivating the ownership, enthusiasm and accountability necessary for your agenda is embracing a different relationship model that is centered on “mutual optimization.”
Organizational
Resilience
An organization’s health and resiliency can be no better than the health and resiliency of its key relationships with customers, suppliers, workforce, and partners. We help organizations identify relational vulnerabilities and risks, and build new organizational “muscles” in Relational Excellence.
Performance Improvement
We bring fresh eyes, 3rd party neutrality, and a holistic view to understanding the root causes of suboptimal performance. Ensuring that a problem is well-defined prevents wasting time and money on efforts that do not create sustainable improvement. Once we’ve well diagnosed the problem, we bring our unique blend of anthropology and engineering to design and co-create practical solutions to elevate performance.
Competitive Talent Landscapes
The talent marketplace has changed significantly. Early retirements, changing worker expectations, remote/hybrid work, and competition from employers anywhere on the globe are just a few of the factors contributing to challenges attracting and keeping talent. Relations Research bring fresh ideas and methods to help organizations adapt to these realities in order to build and maintain a competitive edge.
"Reliance upon generic-productivity work paradigms in demanding business climates can now threaten operational viability... and waste human potential that is mission-critical for achieving and bettering an organization's purpose."
– Danny McCall
Hope is not a Strategy,
Always Vigilant Is
Great companies are already applying vigilance to monitor for emerging competitive threats and to anticipate disruptive events… why not relational vigilance? How many failed transformations would have had a different outcome with an underpinning of less brittle, more resilient stakeholder relationships?
Every business strategy resides on a foundation of crucial relationships– often a complex web of institutional and interpersonal relations, each with multiple dimensions that are always in motion. Early identification of hairline fractures in any of these strategically important relations before they become cracks in the foundation is a daunting task for even the most vigilant leader. Relations Research brings expertise, structure, and tools to master the messiness and complexity of important relationships in your ecosystem.
Outfitting for Crucial Business Relations
1
Guiding Principles/Structure
For making the diagnostics, design and measurement of relations manageable.
2
Reliable Instrumentation
For illuminating the bilateral realities within relations.
3
Tools for Empowering Each Party
For party's improved awareness, design-making and agency.
4
3rd Party Neutrality
and Support
For unbiased diagnostics, remedies and mediation.
