How do I define a solid business relationship? It’s one based on trust, openness, genuine conversations, and feedback.
Building sustainable, strong business relationships is really at the heart of Business Partnering. The partnership you create with your clients and your colleagues impacts the way you work and how you interact. I love the quote, “trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback”. Trust underpins any relationship. You just know when you have it and you certainly feel it when you don’t.
When we think about communication, it’s about how we communicate, but it’s more than that. Having strong rapport with your client means that you’ll have the harder conversations that at times you’ll need to have. The openness, care and respect in the relationship creates the best environment for genuine conversations.
We are big on empathy. Genuine empathy. We spend time learning about how to have more empathy. We do this through really understanding our clients. We consider how they are feeling, what they’re thinking, what they’re hearing and saying, what’s causing them headaches, and what’s giving them joy. When we do this, how we approach the relationship improves because we take the time to understand before we do anything else.
I think people stuff it up when they try too hard, and they’re just not genuine. It’s about playing the long game, achieving small wins, and achieving them often. The quality of your work and how you deliver will always prevail, so it’s about being intentional in how you build business relationships and really seeing it as a privilege to partner with a leader and their team when you’re contribution makes the business better.
