Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How to Build Influence Relationships with Clients, Peers and Partners

How to Build Influence Relationships with Clients, Peers and Partners

If we examine what is going on in vague work relationships, we can reverse engineer a framework for building any solid relationship based on certainty and confidence.


P
ick your influence situation.  Has this happened to you?

  • You have an initiative that requires the buy-in and involvement of another department.  The other group is pre-occupied and stressed out.  Nevertheless, you can’t proceed without them. 
  • You need to resolve a knotty problem caused by the performance of people on a different team who are working with you on a project.  You have no leverage in dealing with them.
  • You discover a colleague in your own work team is performing a task you normally do.  When questioned, she responds that an internal client asked her to do the task.  “It was easy, so I did it.”
  • After talking with some stakeholders, your team makes a number of decisions on a project.  Later, a person who is a tangential stakeholder at best complains, “I should have been invited.”  There is pressure to open up the decision for further deliberation.
  • You are blind-sided by an internal client who calls you to ask about projects that other members of your team are doing for her.  You have no idea how to answer her detailed questions.

These situations can only be managed through the practice of effective influence.  The work we do for or with others who have different agendas, goals and even business values literally hinges on our ability to be good at getting people to “get along”.   

In our recent work, we have clarified a simple way to build relationships and use influence with others.  The remedy is to become client-focused—regardless who the “other” is‑‑ and purposely engineer an experience that meets their expectations, resulting in clarity for all, confidence in what is happening and why. The result of a relationship based on meeting another’s expectations is effectiveness and value.  When expectations are clear all around, trust isn’t far behind.

The Key: Focus On Clarifying “Moments of Truth”

T
he key to influence is to focus on the critical moments in the client (or peer, partner) experience that must be done exceptionally well; the other person’s perception of your skill and effectiveness comes from how well you handle these important points in the relationship.

For example, how new work is initiated is a critical moment.  Starting off with clarity and a shared mental model of goals and process is undoubtedly a good start.  Understanding how the other wants to communicate—content, media, frequency—is another.  How well conflict is handled is also a moment of truth.  These and others have to be soundly managed by you, the influencer, who does the steering and shaping of these moments.  If these are not well executed, you have created a sense of uncertainty and doubt in the mind of the other from which it is difficult to recover.

In a way, these “moments of truth” are not unlike the experience you have when checking into a hotel or getting your car serviced; you have certain expectations for that exact experience that, if not fulfilled, create a disappointment that undermines your view of the brand you are dealing with.  The idea is to take each moment of truth, anticipate what can go wrong—what will distract, create confusion, and breed disappointment and uncertainty—, understand what the client cares about in those moments, and then engineer a useful and valuable experience in its place. 

Here are the “moments of truth” we’ve identified in a typical influence environments with internal clients, peers and partners.  In fact, high-performing salespeople have discovered that making key moments in the sales process valuable for customers is central to relationship building and sales success.  Focusing on making “moments of truth” bullet-proof is undoubtedly the core skill in influencing others.  It also becomes your brand, just as FedEx or Marriott have branded protocols for clients.

Think of each of these situations; determine what a client’s, peer’s or partner’s perspective and expectations might be when they find themselves in that moment.  With that in mind, decide how you--as a team or as an individual‑‑, can purposefully make the experience effective and meet their expectations.   The result is your “Brand”.

§         Start Something New.  Contracting at new beginnings—whether it is a new project, relationship or problem to solve—focuses on clearly explaining and/or mutually designing how the process ahead will unfold.  If there is a formal, multi-phase process of development, the goal is to explain how it will work, how it can flex, who will be involved, what the roles are and what the others involved can expect.  While a formal process may have a designated a “kick off meeting”, that meeting has to be conducted so that the client emerges with a sense of certainty about what will happen and why.  Start Something New is an opportunity to plan the future with the client, peer or partner so that it works for them.  When expectations are clearly set and a path to follow is in place, the future is more certain.

§         Deal With the Unexpected.  Recovering from the inevitable problem is clearly a moment of truth.  Can you decide beforehand how you will handle slip-ups?  Telling or working out guidelines for handling when things go wrong before they go wrong creates another layer of confidence in the relationship.  A discussion that anticipates and plans for bad times, describing what steps will be taken, what options might be available, etc. yields a ready-to-go plan and a sense all around of being ahead of –rather than being overwhelmed by‑‑problems when they emerge.  Alternatively, can you‑‑in your own mind‑‑frame up how you will break unpleasant news to the other person so that it is clear, direct, results in a forward step, and concludes with a positive feeling about how this was done?

§         Manage Conflict.  There are situations where a client, peer or partner will have points of view that are different from yours.  You can position conflict positively, or you can just let it happen.  If you agree to view differences as a positive opportunity to improve work process and outcomes, then you can problem-solve.  If you and your client, peer, or partner view difference as a contest, then you have an argument.  Explicitly steering your client to a positive view of conflict is in everyone’s best interest, and it is another core influence skill.  The experience of resolving differences can become a creative, inclusive and memorable “moment of truth”.  Your goal in a conflict is to learn from the lack of agreement and find a common path.

§         Keep Informed.  It may appear to be a small detail, but how and what you regularly communicate makes a difference to the client, peer or partner experience. This gets complicated when there are a number of functions involved, and each has a different need for information.  To be effective, you have to know who needs to be informed, what media to use to communicate and who needs to keep you informed.  Regularly recapping the big picture works; use charts and at-a-glance exhibits.  We’ve heard from our clients that email isn’t effective anymore—the challenge is to get back to talking with people; it is clearly the best answer.  The question is how to get more face-time.  Think lunch, hallway and elevator discussions, cubicle drop-ins, beers after work.

§         Huddle on Decisions.  One of the most challenging “moments of truth” is decision-making in an influence environment with specialists, generalists, clients, partners, levels of management, etc.  The question of who has approval, who recommends, who is involved, can be defined upfront for the majority of the decisions that need to be made.  But that’s not where decision-making breaks down; it’s the decision that doesn’t fit the pattern, especially where there are overlapping responsibilities, multiple roles that have a stake in the outcome, and people who feel they should be heard.  The challenge here is to take the time to literally figure it out, and the rule of thumb is inclusiveness. That means discussing options in a group or with another—not via email‑‑ until a consensus emerges.  Being able to facilitate an all-stakeholders “figure it out” decision session or an impromptu hallway meeting with a partner is a vital influence skill. 

The Payoff: Your Personal and Your Work Unit’s Brand

I
f these “moments of truth” are executed effectively and consistently, your clients, peers and partners will experience a relationship that works.  If you are conscientious about informing your client-base—“advertising”‑‑ how you work, you are creating a brand promise.  Your clients, peers and partners will know what to expect when working with you.

On the other hand, we’ve seen when these relationships don’t work.  If internal clients, peers or partners are disappointed at the beginning of a relationship because of a cloudy start, it is very difficult to recover.  Trust is the first casualty when a “moment of truth” doesn’t live up to what the client, peer or partner cares about.  Regardless of what happens afterwards to rectify or mitigate, the other person will be on guard, watching and cautious not only now but in the future and not only with you, but with everyone from your organization.

Immediate action step:  Think about—or ask—how your clients, peers and partners view you and your organization at these critical moments.  Put yourself into their experience and see how it feels to working with you.  Using that as a start, build an influence process from there.