Acorn improves business performance
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- Carillion Civils Choose Acorn to Improve Safety Performance
- Acorn Working with TPS
- Strong Leaders in Tough Times
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Teams & Clients - When Relationships Fail:
What’s the Issue?
Successful salesmen use a technique called ‘matching and mirroring’ to help build trust and rapport with their clients. On a larger scale marketers do it too, building an affinity with their companies customers by researching and understanding their needs.
Even the management development world is in on the act. The message behind psychometric testing, like MBTI, Disk and FIRO-B, is that what motivates you is probably very dif...
David Ritchie - 08.01.2010
See full commentTeams & Clients - When Relationships Fail:
What’s the Issue?
Successful salesmen use a technique called ‘matching and mirroring’ to help build trust and rapport with their clients. On a larger scale marketers do it too, building an affinity with their companies customers by researching and understanding their needs.
Even the management development world is in on the act. The message behind psychometric testing, like MBTI, Disk and FIRO-B, is that what motivates you is probably very different from what motivates the people you work with. So to develop productive working relationships you need to understand what makes you tick and what makes your colleagues tick. That way you can pitch the way you work with people to get the best results.
So What’s Different about Bid and Project Teams?
Nothing at all really. But when you get a team of technical specialists together engaged on large, complex and time pressured multi-agency bids or projects, they often loose site of these basic but vital techniques.
Too many bids, and many projects, have failed because the team have focussed on technical and professional detail but neglected to build good and lasting relationships with their client.
Has anyone thought about it?
Yes. Back in 2004 the Australian academic Dr. Norman Chorn published his book Strategic Alignment.
Dr Chorn introduces his PADI model, which is a bit like MBTI for businesses in that It attempts to identify behavioural types for business. Basically he’s saying how does, let us say, a hard bitten, fast moving construction firm differ from its potential client, a government agency? What are the likely points of conflict? How can the construction company tweak, or align, its people, their behaviours, its culture, its strategy - basically the way it works - to improve the productivity of the relationship?
Now, identifying the issues is the easy bit. The next step is to shift the behaviours, culture and leadership of your team to suit. That’s where we come in.
Successful salesmen use a technique called ‘matching and mirroring’ to help build trust and rapport with their clients. On a larger scale marketers do it too, building an affinity with their companies customers by researching and understanding their needs.
Even the management development world is in on the act. The message behind psychometric testing, like MBTI, Disk and FIRO-B, is that what motivates you is probably very different from what motivates the people you work with. So to develop productive working relationships you need to understand what makes you tick and what makes your colleagues tick. That way you can pitch the way you work with people to get the best results.
So What’s Different about Bid and Project Teams?
Nothing at all really. But when you get a team of technical specialists together engaged on large, complex and time pressured multi-agency bids or projects, they often loose site of these basic but vital techniques.
Too many bids, and many projects, have failed because the team have focussed on technical and professional detail but neglected to build good and lasting relationships with their client.
Has anyone thought about it?
Yes. Back in 2004 the Australian academic Dr. Norman Chorn published his book Strategic Alignment.
Dr Chorn introduces his PADI model, which is a bit like MBTI for businesses in that It attempts to identify behavioural types for business. Basically he’s saying how does, let us say, a hard bitten, fast moving construction firm differ from its potential client, a government agency? What are the likely points of conflict? How can the construction company tweak, or align, its people, their behaviours, its culture, its strategy - basically the way it works - to improve the productivity of the relationship?
Now, identifying the issues is the easy bit. The next step is to shift the behaviours, culture and leadership of your team to suit. That’s where we come in.
David Ritchie - 08.01.2010