Fixing Strategic Relationships

Strategic relationships aren’t working as they need to.  We can fix them, saving you time and money, and helping you realise your goals.

In today’s Complex world of constant change and increasing interconnectedness, the importance of strategic relationships cannot be overstated:

• The suppliers you rely on and the partners you work with play a pivotal role in growing your “reach”, enabling you to participate in bigger projects, whilst helping you meet quality, efficiency and delivery obligations and goals.
• Meanwhile, your customers are the heartbeat of your business: they are the foundation of your financial health, and the relationships you build with them are paramount.
• Increasingly, important functions are also outsourced to benefit from specialist expertise and enable you to focus on your core business.

(Interpersonal relationships are of course crucial, too, but our focus here is on relationships with other organisations.)

The Challenge

Your strategic relationships are therefore your biggest single asset – crucial for profit, for growth, for learning, for innovation and for resilience – but also your biggest stumbling block if they don’t realise the Value they need to.

And nowhere are the effects of Complexity felt more keenly than in strategic relationships, which bring together all of these impacts – not just on both of the parties involved, but also on the relationship between them – and where issues can rapidly snowball exponentially.

The result? Most relationships aren’t delivering the value that they should.

The Solution: Value Management

The need for improvement is widely acknowledged, with much attention being put on them – e.g. the growth of “relational contracting”, the development of standards (such as ISO 44001), etc.

But, whilst such things have their place, the primary challenge is a familiar one: the Things That Matter are not effectively surfaced, expressed, managed, measured or delivered on.

The parties are therefore not properly aligned with each other – at worst at odds with each other – with invisible and unresolved perception gaps that work against effectiveness, whilst the most important aspects of the relationship are not being addressed.

No wonder that the Symptoms of What’s Not Working soon follow.

Get started today with our Three Steps to Value to put you firmly on the path to transformed strategic relationships, money saved, improved morale, and value realised.