Tag: Partnering Skills

3 Reasons Why Reading Flawless Consulting Is Not Enough

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Yes, reading is fundamental. And as a valuable and essential method of learning, it does have its limitations, particularly when it comes to acquiring practical skills. Solely relying on reading to learn a skill can be as limiting as learning how to ride a bike by only reading an instruction manual. Mere words on a page won’t help you learn how to maintain balance, coordinate pedaling, steering, and braking, or anticipate obstacles. To avoid getting a flat tire when influencing others, here are 3 reasons why only reading Flawless Consulting is not enough to get your expertise used:

  1. Complex Skills: Consulting skills are intricate and multifaceted, requiring a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. For instance, you may read about the many steps required of consultants within each Consulting Phase, but without actually practicing and honing these steps, you won’t become proficient. Which steps might you have forgotten? What’s possible in reviewing these helpful checklists and worksheets with your clients and asking for their agreement to experience them together?
  2. Lack of Practical Application: Reading alone doesn’t provide hands-on experience. Consulting skills require practice and real-world application to truly master them. Without practical experience, you may struggle to translate theoretical knowledge into real-world actions. For example, consultants often find it easy to ask clients for what they want but can’t imagine putting directly into words what they want from the client to make a project successful. It’s not until this vital skill is practiced that asking for what you want becomes fathomable. Did you know Designed Learning offers coaching and consulting to help you solve problems and impact relationships? How might a conversation with one of Designed Learning’s certified coaches help you implement what you’ve read?
  3. Social Interaction and Collaboration: Consulting skills involve connecting and collaborating with others. Reading alone may not adequately prepare you for real-world interactions that are essential for flawless consultation. When learning a skill, feedback is crucial for improvement. Reading doesn’t offer immediate feedback on your performance or help you identify and correct mistakes in real-time. Did you know that even before the book was published, author Peter Block designed Flawless Consulting as a workshop? It’s true! Our Flawless Consulting® workshop inspires mastery of the promises and phases of the renowned book with an interactive and powerful learning experience. Through use of case studies, role plays, and simulations, participants gain insight into their own individual consulting skills, try new behaviors, and test assumptions to see what impact changes may have on their results and satisfaction back on the job.

Engaging with a skill beyond reading, such as through practical application and experiential learning, can enhance your motivation and enthusiasm for learning. Reading alone might not provide the same level of motivation. Better to combine it with hands-on practice, real-world experience, and interactive learning methods to fully develop your consulting skills. Just like learning to ride a bike, Designed Learning’s solutions and services ensure your skills to have your expertise used, transform organizations, and build healthy partnerships will quickly come back to you when needed.

by JP Tier

Partnership – Great goal; Insufficient word

Posted on by Jeff Evans

As we work and live with others, the word partnership seems to be a common goal. We want to build business partnerships, partner better, and we want others to partner with us.  Partnership is a good word and a worthy goal. 

Questions I ask Myself

  • What does partnership look like?
  • Who do I want to partner with?
  • How do I achieve partnership?
  • What can I specifically do to build partnerships?

These questions seem easy to answer on the surface, but I find that the goal of partnership eludes me more often than I want. I have conversations with others, and we seem to want a partnership together, but most often, I don’t invest the time to understand and act on what partnership could look like.

For example, one of my former bosses asked me to help her organization build “strategic business partnerships” with their internal business partners. I loved the idea and started changing the way I interfaced with other leaders. First, I asked more questions. Also, I delayed my recommendations until I knew more about the issue they were facing. I worked to co-create possible solutions with them instead of quickly implementing their solutions or mine. It didn’t take long for one of these leaders to call my boss to complain that I wasn’t being cooperative and that I was delaying decisions.

My boss came to me and asked what I was doing. When I said I was trying to build “strategic business partnerships,” she said, “That is what we want, but don’t upset the clients. Just do what they ask you to do”. It’s clear my boss and I had different ideas on what these partnerships would look like.

Some Partnership Challenges

Building partnerships is not complex. In fact, it can be simple to understand. We create a common understanding of what we are going to do together (short-term or long-term) and we share what we want from each other and negotiate an agreement.

The challenge in building partnerships comes when I actually have the conversation. I may even avoid the conversation altogether. I get in my own way. My desire to be right, to minimize my risk, to be safe, and to gain a predictable outcome get in the way. There is also a sense of urgency to get things done and act. Unfortunately, nothing about partnerships is predictable or risk-free, and urgency is the enemy of quality – the quality of the outcome and the quality of the relationship.

So, What Do We Do?

There are many aspects to building partnerships. I have found the easiest and most beneficial is to minimize assumptions and vagueness in our language. When we ask for something we want, we need to be specific. I had a mentor years ago who told me to avoid “goodness” words. That statement itself is vague, so I asked, “What’s a goodness word?”. He said, “Goodness words describe things we want, and they are good (things like support, buy-in, partnership, respect, etc.), but they are not sufficient for a meaningful agreement.”

The antidote for the goodness word is to ask myself and share with you, “What does it look like?”. If you are giving me support, this is what you would be doing. If we are going to have a partnership, this is how we will treat each other. This is what respect looks like to me.

Asking these next-level questions takes time. I need to pause and get specific with myself and others. I assume you know what I mean, and I think I know what you mean. These assumptions are recipes for poor agreements. I am learning to share with others the behaviors I am looking for and to ask them what behaviors they want from me. Having this next level of conversation is a small investment in time that pays big dividends with agreements that last and partnerships that thrive.

 

Build better partnerships by putting your focus on relational skills with Flawless Consulting. Attend a workshop today. 

Trust in Whom?

Posted on by Peter Block

Most of the time we talk about trust as if it has its own independent existence. We can build trust; we can destroy trust. This treats it like it is an aspect of relationship and based on how people behave with each other. Are we trustworthy… are they trustworthy? We talk of others violating our trust, often in the workplace it is management who gets more than their share of the blame. We expect leaders to be congruent, to walk their talk, and if they don’t, we think we have a “trust problem.” Or, if we are the leader, we are puzzled why the employees don’t trust us.

These frames trust as if it is determined by behavior. I want to offer another point of view.

Trust is more an expression of our own inner world, not an outside-in reaction to people and events as they affect us.

Trust is a State of Mind

Vaclav Havel from his “Politics of Hope” book writes about hope in a way that also applies to trust. Editing him slightly, he says, “I should say first that hope is above all a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope in us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some observation of the world or estimate of the situation.”

As with hope, trust may be something that we carry within us and is, in many ways, a projection of our own internal struggle onto those around us. If we distrust others, it is that we are asking them to carry a weight that we cannot bear within ourselves.

Trust is more an attitude about myself, an estimate of my own capacities. For example, if I do not trust management, a more accurate statement is that I am not happy with the way I act or I feel when I am around management. It is my response to their power that bothers me. My caution. My speaking in generalities. My quickness to back down in the face of an indifferent or controlling act on their part. My short-fused cynicism may be more the source of my distrust, than anything they do.

Distrust is too often a projection onto powerful others of our own ambivalence.

Anytime, Anywhere

If trust is my goal, then I must come to terms with my own shadow: the power I give to others, the denial of my own ambivalence about participation, the fact I do not walk my talk, have silenced my own voice, have left behind my own faith and innocence. Trust is the willingness to go public with all of who I am. If I could ever really believe this, (rather than write about it), then my “trust problem” might fade. Why we think it is the task of people in power to create a high trust environment, I no longer understand.

I can create a high trust environment any time I want. All I must realize is that I am creating the environment in which I live. We are afraid of being naïve and a fool if we continue to trust in the face of others’ betrayal. Well, what is so great about being strategic and clever? And what is so wrong about being a fool? Maybe being willing to be a fool is the exact means of creating the high trust world that we each long for.

If you want help creating a high-trust environment anytime you want, check out our newest program, Flawless Conversations: Building Trusting Relationships, to learn how.

Business Partnering: The Secret to Influence in the Workplace

Posted on by Steven Lozada
What is Business Partnering?
To understand business partnering we’ll start by identifying who are Business Partners. This may help you determine whether you are one or should become one.
Here’s a start:
Business Partners are practitioners of critical business functions like HR, Finance, IT, Legal, Project Management, and others. They’re internal consultants. These professionals act as a bridge, linking their critical functions to other business units, clients, managers, and even C-suite executives.
 
Business partners seek to operate in partnership with other stakeholders to effectively address the real and current concerns of the business. Their purpose is to create a space of shared ownership for generating positive results.
These are professionals who have the potential to greatly improve the power of integration within the organization…when given the space and opportunity to do so, of course.
 
They maximize the effective and efficient deployment of their skills and expertise within a shared understanding of business priorities.
 
If this describes you, then continue reading because you’re about to uncover some keys to unlock some doors that lead to greater influence in the workplace.

What Business Partnering (done well) Requires

Business Partnering requires the consistent application of TECHNICAL EXPERTISE and TRUSTING RELATIONSHIPS.
 
Please read those two virtues again. Refuse to ignore them at all costs. I learned about their powerful combination at a Flawless Consulting workshop. They’re simple but mighty.
Here’s why:
If you want to become a valued partner, then the sole use of your technical expertise and experience will be insufficient. You may give excellent advice and even create stunning slide decks that can mesmerize executives. But if they don’t have a trusting relationship with you, then your power to generate desirable change is a mere illusion…a dandelion in a windstorm.
To avoid this miserable situation, you must multiply your technical expertise with an unrelenting persistence to build trust.
 
CAUTION: Without the power of relationship and relatedness, your technical expertise may become a disposable commodity.
Trust is likely the missing secret ingredient in many previous failed attempts at strategic partnership because without trust there is no influence.

Some necessary skills

What follows are some skills that you can incorporate to keep from becoming a commodity. Imagine the benefits of leaping measurably closer to being a trusted business partner when you develop consulting, communication, and negotiation skills.

Consulting skills

At the heart of consulting is the ability to have conversations that matter most. It’s about creating meaningful connections with others while moving the business forward in the face of mounting complexities.
This is contrary to the common misconception that consultants impose an elevated business acumen, impressive credentials, and vast experience to give credibility to their own opinions, above anyone else.
Consulting is not something you do to and for someone, it’s a service you offer to do with someone.

Communication Skills

The adaptive ability to speak clearly about ideas, issues, and opportunities. If you’re going to generate agreements and coordinate actions with others, then being specific, descriptive, and measurable about what you want is essential.
 
For example, when requesting a report from someone, avoid saying: “Hey, I know you’re busy, but it would be great to have that report when you get a chance.” This is too vague to make an agreement. Instead, be specific, descriptive, and measurable by saying: “Hey, I know you’re busy, but can you get me the finalized report tomorrow by 4:00 pm?” This is a minor detail, but a major difference.
 
Speaking with precision is critical to communication, but deep listening is the often neglected part of communication skills building.
 
If you want to be more influential, then listening beyond the words into the spaces of silence, and listening without judgment, is necessary. You can achieve this by not jumping to conclusions and into advice-giving. Just listen with compassionate curiosity. This non-superficial type of listening will position you to discover what’s going unsaid, and explore what’s possible.

Negotiation Skills

The ability to create a social contract with people by offering them a psychologically safe space to explore risks, share control, and commit to shared action. This opposes the common view of negotiation. Negotiation does not have to be an adversarial exchange where two parties struggle with one another until they ultimately agree to “split the difference.”
There’s a better way.
Instead of preparing for battle, prepare to explore what you and your “client” want from one another in order to achieve success. As risks and concerns emerge during those discussions, give your support to one another, and model the behavior you want to promote in your partnership. You can do this all while seeking mutual benefit. This is how to be successful in being useful and valuable.

Why Business Partnering Matters Today

The role of HR, Finance, IT, Legal, Project Management, and other internal consultants has changed. These functions used to be about managing employees, managing resources, and providing compliance services. Today, it’s about building relationships with clients, navigating challenges, and creating value with them. 
 
Business Partnering is about leveraging your ability to:
  • Develop trusted connections with authenticity by putting your experience into words.
  • Handle resistance with compassion and diligence.
  • Be willing to sit with ambiguity for longer than many feel comfortable with.
  • Slow down to truly “sense” the situation without a need for a fast resolution of issues.
Your business and professional influence will grow as you increase the effective use of business partnering on a consistent basis.

You Don’t Need An Expert. You Need a PARTNER.

Posted on by admin

When facing change, you don’t need an expert. You need partnership.

Your company probably looks at change with a mix of excitement and fear. And while you may want certain parts of your organization to change, it is scary to take on the actual responsibility of making it happen. It is much safer and easier to delegate the actual transformation to someone else. This typically is where consultants come into the picture. And why not? Experts are constantly touted as the only ones knowledgeable and powerful enough to lead.

But there is a catch.

Relinquishing responsibility to an expert breeds an unhealthy dependency. When problems inevitably come up again you won’t know how to confront them yourself.

There is also a problem for the consultant. If you’re the consultant, this tendency also makes your job harder. Removing the client from the problem-solving process makes it more likely the changes you recommend will be resisted.

So what is the way forward?

The Promise of Partnership

The answer is opting for partnership instead of relying on experts.

Experts merely seek to solve the problem. But partners bring change in a way that makes you take ownership not only for the solution but for the problem itself.

Partners effectively and compassionately dissolve unhealthy reliance on the expert. The result is that clients gain sufficient expertise to diagnose and solve future problems on their own.

But how does this partnership consulting work?

How to Make Pearls

A partner’s first task is to confront you with the true nature of your problems. Often you already know this, but you either don’t realize it, or you find it so hard to deal with that you struggle to admit it without provocation. This confrontation is often uncomfortable. But new wisdom cannot be formed without it.

The best analogy for this is how pearls are made. Two things are required to form these valuable prizes: sand and oysters. Sand gets into the oyster and rubs it the wrong way. The oyster reacts by trying to get rid of the irritant. But in the process, something beautiful and precious is formed.

Don’t get the impression that this is easy. Bringing any kind of meaningful change to an organization requires a high investment of emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical rigor. The culture and habits sustained in an organization are often ferociously rooted and feel “right” from the inside. And so the only way to shock the oyster out of its comfort is to throw a little sand in its shell.

Partnering consultants must first, therefore, bring the sober truth about the organization’s dysfunctions.

This is a painful process. But the reward is invaluable for the organization.

The Perils of Partnership

Just like making pearls, partnership is difficult to practice. First of all, it is hard to convince clients that they are getting their money’s worth. They often have a rigid expectation that they are bringing in an expert who will simply fix things and move on. On the other hand, it can be just as hard to convince consultants their task is anything but fixing things themselves. The secret here is to accept that as a partner you have to sacrifice that latent desire to take full credit for creating the solution. That’s not sexy, but it is ultimately better for both parties.

Another common pitfall is what is known as professional codependence. Just as clients can become dependent on the expert, the professional can become codependent on the client.

Professional codependence when the professional–consciously or not–begins to create client needs in order to prove their own worth and make ends meet.

One way that this manifests is when, rather than identifying opportunities for growth, consultants begin to see client needs as deficiencies. This is more than a labeling problem. This often leads to anticipating problems that don’t exist. Such a dynamic all but guarantees dependency because it presumes that the client lacks what they need to get rid of the deficiency. And even more than this, it then positions the expert as the only one who can determine whether the solution has been effective.

So how can you pursue partnership without the pitfalls?

Acting in Partnership

Developing partnership while avoiding dependencies on both sides is challenging. Let’s explore this challenge through the lens of parenting. To raise responsible adults, parents experience the tension, on the one hand, between protecting their children by sheltering them and telling them what to do…while on the on the other hand allowing their children to have self-discovery and learn on their own. Choosing partnership will often feel the same for the consultant.

It is essential to guard yourself against your client’s codependency even if this seems unloving at first. If not, you run the risk of getting lost in your expert role and short-circuiting the client’s growth and freedom.

Become Your Own Expert

Perhaps more than ever, society constantly reinforces the notion that experts are the only ones who can be trusted to solve your problems. But blindly signing over authority and action to experts only stunts your growth. You can’t learn how to think for yourself when you constantly rely on others to tell you what to think.

This doesn’t mean you will never need assistance. What it means is that you need to do the work to become your own expert even while you seek expertise from others. This is the promise of partnership.

How To Reimagine Workplace Politics

Posted on by admin

The first rule about workplace politics is that nobody will tell you the rules. But everyone somehow knows how the unspoken web of power dynamics works. Or do they?

This fake certainty is one reason we must reimagine workplace politics.

Managers often spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how to deal with difficult employees, peers, or bosses. At first glance, this appears to be a normal function of living in the workplace, a closer look reveals that this is more about workplace politics.

The game of workplace politics becomes a tool for negotiating your own position to avoid getting resistance from others in response to your actions. Given enough time and experience, with a non-nutritious sprinkling of gossip, you eventually learn to play the game. You learn to speak the “right” way, to the “right” people, in order to get the “right” reaction. The worst part of all this is it works.

So what’s the problem?

The problem with workplace politics is that it becomes a game where you achieve short-term goals by acting in a way that is not an example of the world you want to live in.

There’s a winner and there’s a loser, and playing the game means that you are simultaneously both.

Think about it, it’s like sawing-off a tree branch while you’re sitting on it!

So why get better at a bad game? The answer is to make a better game…because it is possible to reframe workplace politics as an act of service for the future you want to create.

Workplace Politics as Usual

The traditional rules of workplace politics center around managing and manipulating situations, information, and people to your own advantage. Tactics include being very cautious in telling the truth, selectively invoking high-level names to gain support, closely managing relationships, and paying great attention to what the people above you want.

A sea of books will tell you that you’ll gain attention, move up the ranks, and pull your own strings by mastering these strategies. And you probably will. But in the process, you perpetuate a patriarchal cycle that actually coerces you to surrender your power and autonomy. By “playing the game” you effectively exchange your freedom for dependence on those with power over you.

But what other option is there?

Choosing an Entrepreneurial Path

This doesn’t mean you have to start your own business. Instead, the solution here is to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset that reframes politics in a positive way.

An Entrepreneurial mindset is a path to reclaiming the freedom and accountability that has been surrendered to the unfulfilling game of workplace politics.

The outcome is a powerful yet non-manipulative way to negotiate power and relationships within your organization. It is a move away from obligating compliance to inviting collaboration.

This transformation shift comes down to you making three fundamental choices.

1. Possibility Over Maintenance

Firstly, the path of positive politics chooses possibility over maintenance. Much of traditional workplace politics is preoccupied with safety for fear of losing ground. The more you move up, the more energy you expend to avoid losing what you have. And so decisions become more and more driven by a desire for maintaining. What this really reflects is the choice to be led by others.

The antidote is for you to choose possibility. Making a commitment to building something great carries real risk. It is dangerous. But the first step in being political in a positive way is making the choice not to just maintain what you have, but to reach for unreachable possibilities.

2. Courage Over Caution

This leads us to the second choice, which is courage over caution. There are hundreds of ways that corporate culture drives an atmosphere of caution. Here are just two of the more pervasive ways: Performance reviews and high-pressure presentations to top management. These two are designed to produce extremely measured and conservative behavior. This makes perfect sense when you realize that the aforementioned “Maintenance” requires caution. But striving for greatness requires courage.

Working for a better future always requires courage. And it mostly comes in small steps. Usually, you are the only one aware of the risk you are taking. But your choice for self-assertion and risk is the antidote to caution and maintaining what we have inherited or amassed on our own.

3. Autonomy Over Dependence

Thirdly, the entrepreneurial mindset must choose autonomy over dependence. A culture of maintenance and caution thrives on breeding dependence.

When your aim is to scale the political ladder, you implicitly agree to a kind of parental contract. Their job is to lead and reward and your job is to listen and obey.

But autonomy is the attitude that declares: my actions are my own and I help create the organization I am a part of. By choosing autonomy, you are recovering the freedom you willingly surrendered to play the game. You are recovering what you once gave away, not taking back what was taken from you. This is something you can do without asking permission.

The entrepreneurial culture does not take effect in top-down programs or C-Suite announcements. The only way to change the game is to act in small ways that affect a new culture in recurring moments.

In a way, the only culture that really exists is what happens in the room, the meeting, the conversation you are in right now. By making the choice to pursue positive workplace politics, you will embody the culture you want to create and the short-term goals will take care of themselves.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001 and Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 2017]

How Useless Are “Performance Standards” In The Workplace Today?

Posted on by admin

There is a common belief that for change to occur in an organization you must set high-performance standards and develop clear measures against that standard. These performance standards, we’re told, must be consistent across the culture and approved by top management, otherwise, they will not be effective. This belief is so ingrained that it has become the standard operating procedure, and questioning it might seem hopelessly idealistic.

But have you noticed that some of the things the world values most RESIST STRICT MEASUREMENT OF PERFORMANCE STANDARDS?

Consider the “softer” values such as trust, integrity, and creativity. You’ve likely noticed they’re often the ones with the most power to shape the world around us, yet these seem to stubbornly resist being subjected to a standard of measurement.

So, how can you reframe the conversation around needing measurable performance standards as a pre-requisite for producing the kind of results and the type of workplace that promotes the common good?

What’s wrong with Performance Standards

If you’re operating on the assumption that change is driven by measures and standards, you’ll set new performance standards and create universal measures against those standards. Perhaps you would establish an oversight committee to measure performance standards and adherence to those new standards.

In the case of unsatisfactory performance, you might conclude that efforts failed because the standards were not high enough and the measures were not sufficiently accurate.

This happens time and time again until a change effort is made, creating a new set of standards and measures to drive-up performance. You’ve likely seen this cycle play out in the proliferation of high-stakes standardized testing in public education.

Let’s reframe Performance Standards

To be honest, we need measurable performance standards. We all want to know what is required of us and how we are doing. We’re not proposing getting rid of measurable standards altogether. Instead, we propose a shift to focus on who sets the standards and measures and how they are used.

Too often measurable performance standards are used as a control device, not a mechanism for learning. This flows from a particular mode of thinking grounded in problem-solving. It is the engineering mind that elevates standards and measures to the level of dogma and ideology. This is fine for engineering projects.

But the idea that we can engineer human development is more mythology than fact.

Standards-setting has become part of the class struggle in society, where one class of people is setting standards for another. Legislators set them for teachers, management set them for workers, professional guilds set them for their members. They may start with sincere intent, but they soon become exclusionary and punitive. They become a way to limit access to membership, force compliance, and keep those who were first through the door in their positions of power.

What Performance Standards matter to YOU?

The solution to over-surveillance, isolation, and protecting the status quo is to have people close to the learning and development, the work, or the service struggle with installing proper performance standards for their local environment.

Ask people to define the performance that will have meaning for them. Then have them talk about how they want to hold themselves accountable. This reduces the possibility that measurable performance standards will become punitive. Once measures become punitive, people will work to outsmart them to survive; learning decreases, and energy that should be going toward achieving the work is replaced by subversive efforts to “beat the system.”

How does this work?

Instead of a centralized mandate that is rolled out across the culture of the organization, have the performance standards designed by those who are being measured.

Then a few guiding principles should follow.

Firstly, it is essential to be realistic about predictability. Secondly, value longer-term, qualitative measures. Remember: even if you cannot measure it, it might still be worth doing. Most often what is measured are people’s methods and behavioral style. But what if you were to stop measuring people’s behavioral styles and start measuring business results and real outcomes?

Do you risk Quality Control?

Wait! How can management maintain quality when each unit, each workgroup, each team decides its own measures and performance standards? Don’t worry, there is still quality control. The difference is that is it maintained by team members and peer-to-peer agreements.

Rather than typical carrot-and-stick tactics, what if performance standards were negotiated between peers and then with bosses as the means of ensuring that commitments get fulfilled? These contracts would be between partners, so the expectations and commitments go both ways, with equal demands placed on each side.

The intent here is to eliminate coercion as the basis for getting results. These performance contracts are not tied to pay or punishment, though they may be tied to termination in extreme cases. We can fire people if they do not deliver on their promise. What is different is that we stop trying to improve employee performance by threatening sanctions, manipulating privilege, or withholding pay.

Do what matters most:

  1. Rather than create a central mandate, have the people closest to the work decide the standards appropriate for their local environment.
  2. Ask members of the peer group or team to define the measures that have meaning for them.
  3. Have peer groups decide how to keep themselves accountable, with bosses and employees serving to ensure commitments are fulfilled.