Failing Business Relationships: Navigating the Relationship Life Cycle to enable more Choice

Organisational life primarily consist of navigating systems, functions, processes, people, and hierarchies. Relationships at work, at their best, can act as a catalyst to navigation, serving as a resource that propels you forward to achieve a wider goal. Failing relationships, however, detract, drain, and pull you away from the goal. Since the lowest common denominator and highest valued resource in any organisation is its people, second to that the relationships that exist between people, it is impossible to achieve the highest level of organisational success if business relationships are failing.

While investing heavily in recruitment and retention of the best talent is valuable, if we end here senior leaders are at risk of a massive leakage in value from people. Building and maintaining effective relationships takes work and often requires guidance and support. It’s not enough to assume that bright and talented people will ‘just know’ how to navigate the intricacies of human and system dynamics, or that it’s common sense. Great relationships are fundamental to personal and professional thriving and yet many feel dis-empowered, un-resourceful, or unaware of how to build and maintain effective relationships at work. Without a good level of self- and other-awareness and emotional intelligence, we can get it very, very wrong if we just leave it to guesswork.

An Article by Tiffany Missiha