A Theory of Business Relationships: Five Principles for Success and Sustainability

Relationship is at the core of social evolution. Relationship is the way in which two or more people or things are connected with each other. While relationships are usually interpreted in terms of family ties and friendly moorings, relationships extend far beyond family cocoons or friendship circles. In a broader perspective, relationship is the way in which two or more people or groups regard and behave towards each other.  Many such relationships that are beyond the family system are experienced by us; for example, the teacher-student relationship, the doctor-patient relationship, the employer-employee relationship, the landlord-tenant relationship, the people-government relationship, the buyer-seller relationship, the multiple stakeholder relationships, and so on. In fact, virtually everyone has a relationship with someone else he or she deals with, in one way or the other.

At the very basic level, awareness of one another results in just a cognitive relationship. As it evolves into an acquaintance, a reciprocating relationship develops. Reciprocation could just be in the form of exchange of greetings or could extend to exchange of information or other material factors. While one could experience hundreds of reciprocal relationships, only a few would evolve into sustainable relationships. For a relationship to be sustainable, the relationship must traverse through three stages. The first is rapport, the second is credibility and the third is trust. Rapport exists when two people or agencies have a close and harmonious relationship, understanding each other’s feelings and ideas, and communicating well. Credibility exists when one stands convincing, believable and capable of fulfilling the promise, in a consistent manner. Repeated demonstration of credibility leads to a firm belief in the truth, reliability and ability of someone or something. Trust has, in most cases, a material fiduciary responsibility and accountability.

Business relationships

Business relations are varied; from one-off casual interactions to legally binding business contracts, there are many ways in which business relations evolve. Some are business to business (B2B) while some are business to consumer (B2C). There are others like business to government which are legal and regulatory, and certain others such as business to society that are more qualitative and abstract. Whatever be the nature of relationship, the three step process defined above, and comprising ‘rapport, credibility and trust’ is a must. Even in respect of one-off transactional relationships, the process builds value for the present or for the future. Business managements have traditionally seen financial ownership and/or commercial partnership, with legal structuring, as the predominant basis to form and protect relationships, but there is more to it.

Relationships are also subject to competitive dynamics. Exclusive dealerships have, in the past, been the preferred relationships for sales and marketing. Over a period, multi-brand dealerships have started appearing (whether in the same dealer format or co-owned dealer format). Simultaneously, companies started setting up their own selling plazas (for example, Maruti Nexa). Just as social relationships are disturbed by dynamics of families and friends, business relations are also disturbed by competitive dynamics. Any amount of legal mandating may not help when competitive dynamics disturb. These influences could be for cost and price advantages or growth compulsions. These could also be due to lack of relationship between the people who manage the relationships.

Interpersonal complexities

Business relationships are far more complex than usually imagined. It is not as simple as measuring performance or profits as generally thought to be. Each business relation is, in fact, a complex maze of interpersonal relationships.  There are three such principal complexities.

The first is generational complexity. When first set up, later managed or eventually terminated, it is people who interpret and endorse or negate a business relationship. A business relationship has four distinct phases; commercial discovery, legal templating, operational performance, and performance review. All the phases are carried out by individuals on either side of the relationship. As individuals change, not only the dynamics change but the initial perspectives tend to get lost.

The second is horizontal complexity. Although a transaction is fulfilled at one end of a business value chain the actual utility could be far out in the value chain. A typical example is a vendor relationship which could impact manufacturing. If persons leading or operating at different points of value chain cannot communicate holistically and meaningfully, even simple performance issues could lead to enormous noise in the system and destabilize relationships.

The third is vertical complexity. Certain business relationships are initiated, structured and signed off at the top between senior leaders, and handed over to operating teams below to execute. While the jobs may be handed down, the perspectives and the subtleties may never be cascaded down. In certain other cases, a business relationship may be established at the operating level but could come to the notice of, and review by, senior leaders at a later stage. The juniors may not be able to explain appropriately, or even lack the strategic approach the senior leadership now takes. This could also create noise in the system.  

Given that business relationships are built on interpersonal foundations, the need for a systemic yet a people oriented approach to business relationships is self-evident. Five principles for successful and sustainable business relationships are discussed below.

Five principles

There are five principles of trustworthy and trusting business relationships that can be built with interpersonal trust model. 

Strategic

Not every business relationship is, or needs to be, made at the CEO or CXO levels. Consistent with the nature of business relationship, the highest leader must, however, be involved. A new green field expansion by a component supplier needs certainly CEO to CEO partnership. However, an arrangement for housekeeping will not require such intervention; yet, within the boundary at least the functional managers must be involved from either side. The involvement of senior managers and leaders helps in the avoidance of ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ approaches and instead focus on long term value creation. Involvement of strategic leaders ensures that operating executives are not threatened by self-perceived need to save the pennies at the cost of long term value.   

Risk based

All relations aim at rewards. It would be fallacious, however, to assume that there are risk-free approaches to business relationships. The more novel a business relationship is, the risk profile could be higher even as its competitive advantage could be higher. If the relation follows a beaten or established path, it suffers from another type of risk of eroding margins. No amount of legally binding contractual language can identify and provide for all current and future risks. Interpersonal rapport, credibility and trust help in addressing risk professionally. One may have a perfectly collaborative relationship with a competitor (like Apple and Samsung have) when the risk and reward tracks are not intermixed, and respective leaders are allowed to deal with competitive and collaborative aspects separately.

Stage-gated

Business relationships should not be founded on expectations of immediate miraculous results. Adequate time should be allowed for operational teams to strike rapport, prove credibility and establish trust. Leaders have a particular responsibility in selecting lead managers who have positive interpersonal approaches and sound fundamentals. Many times, conceptually sound partnerships flounder due to cantankerous managers who are self-obsessed rather than focused on mutual value creation. If the first stage of rapport does not take place, the sponsor-leaders have a responsibility to either counsel the lead managers or replace them with more harmonious ones. Similarly, if credibility is not established with repetitive consistent performance, the processes must be relooked.  Normally, a quarter of rapport building and another quarter of credibility establishment, at the maximum, may be allowed to assess the precursors to trust. And, transparency is the key to assessment of trust.

Transparency

Transparency starts from the initiation of a business relationship. Mature leaders realize that placing mutual expectations, strengths, weaknesses and resource capabilities on discussion table help establish the fundamental rules of transparency in a business relationship. Many do not realize that understanding the weaknesses of partners helps build greater strengths in the relationship as a whole. For example, when an Indian outsourcing partner does not have global sourcing strength, and discloses that weakness upfront the sponsoring client would be able to leverage its own global sourcing network to meet the gaps.   This transparency may cost the outsourcing partner a pricing advantage, and the sponsoring company an overhead burden but will provide to both greater business value. Transparency helps in win-win alliances as well as in developing trust to handle risks and share rewards equitably.

Codification

There are two ways to handle interpersonal complexities, whether generational, horizontal or vertical. One way is to have the same people handle the business relation, longitudinally in time, horizontally in value chain, and vertically in hierarchy. In this case, institutionalized knowledge and practice keeps building on established relationships. However, ‘people-perpetuity’ is hardly possible. People have to be moved in and out of positions, and careers; and even if they stay static, changes in business environment with new competitive dynamics induce changes in people. The only insulation can be through codification of perspectives, processes and expectations with which a relationship is set up, and the implicit and explicit value from the relationship. Partnership codification must be a living document, enriched with progressive setbacks and accomplishments.

Partnership as relationship

Partnership, in a legal meaning, is an association between persons or entities which involves pooling of all resources and sharing of all assets and liabilities, usually in the ratio in which respective resources are brought in by the parties. Partnership, in practice, is the consummate form of a relationship which brings in the concepts of sharing equally and equitably. Relationship is a generic way of two entities connecting with each other while partnership is a customized definition of equitable relationship. Partnership signifies a shared future. There are times when partnership itself has to move an even more sublime relationship.

Partnerships are challenged when one of the partners is beset by serious business troubles for extended periods of time. Imagine the relationship between a truck maker who makes only trucks and is hit by recession and a component maker who caters to all types of automobiles, some of them growing in demand. If the component maker agrees to price reductions to support the truck maker and stays on through the cycle of recession collaboratively without shifting capacity, it goes beyond partnership; it will be companionship. Strange it may seem in a hardnosed business context, companionship is the sublime form of business relationship, as in personal relationships.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on May 14, 2016        

Awareness, Self-awareness and Humility: The Three Components of Sustainable Success

On May 9, 2014, there was an interesting article that appeared in the Times of India, “Humility makes CEOs from India Stand Out”, which hypothesized that the ascent of Indian origin leaders as CEOs in global corporations is related to Indians being humble by nature. The reference has been, among others, to Indra Nooyi, Chairperson of Pepsi, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard and Rajiv Suri, CEO of Nokia Networks. There is no doubt that persons from outside the Western world would find it hard to reach apex positions in Western headquartered global corporations. This is as unsurprising as a Western executive finding it difficult to be at the helm of a Japanese corporation. National culture has probably has as much role as notional competence in influencing leadership choices. The ascent of Indians to CEO positions is, therefore, remarkable and noteworthy. 

The article quotes Govind Iyer, managing director of Egon Zehnder India, a leading executive search firm as stating that humility is the key to being a respected leader as that means the leader is receptive towards learning and professional growth. He also clarifies that humility does not mean one cannot be aggressive and extrovert. He emphasizes that these qualities need to be displayed with humility. Rajiv Burman, managing director of Lighthouse Partners, another executive search firm hypothesizes in the article that given the strong emphasis in the Indian culture on family and social relationships, the Indian leaders work very effectively in groups with humility. Vivek Chandra, country manager-India, Harvard Business Publishing considers that leaders who develop higher self-awareness tend to be more humble.  In the same article, Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice is quoted as saying that emphasis on authenticity and inner journey is a characteristic of changing leadership expectations.

Hard and soft

Leaders are expected to lead. It is therefore believed that leaders must exert their presence with knowledge, expression and execution through which they must be able to influence and align their followers. Aggression and extroversion, enjoying success every bit openly, are also considered good additions to a successful leadership profile. These may well be the ‘hard’ qualities that define leadership. Leadership built only on these hard factors tends to be vulnerable to performance dips even if performance drivers are beyond the leader’s control. Leaders need certain ‘soft’ qualities that help the leaders go beyond driving and influencing. Soft qualities are those that endear leaders to their followers. They help the leaders connect with their followers and even non-followers sustainably. Mahatma Gandhi is an enduring example of soft qualities adding sheen and sustainability to leadership. Humility has been the most prominent of Gandhi’s soft leadership qualities.

The role of humility in influencing leadership development is not well understood. Humility is the quality of being humble. Humility is the quality of thinking that one is not better than others (although one’s achievements or others’ opinions may imply so). One’s humility is never expressed but is invariably felt and experienced by others. Humility can never be a sign of weakness or passivity rather it stems out of one’s conviction and courage, in a sense. Winston Churchill stated that while it requires courage to stand up and speak out it also requires courage to sit down and listen. This is an interesting concept. Individuals who are humble to face constructive challenges are often able to discover their own abilities or learn new capabilities that help manage them. The earlier discussed aspect of self-awareness is the foundation for developing authenticity which is capped by humility.

Awareness and self-awareness

The author in two of his earlier blog posts discussed aspects of awareness and self-awareness.  These are “Self-actualization by One’s Self for Oneself: An Enlightened Process for the Elusive Goal”, Strategy Musings, April 21, 2013 (http://cbrao2008.blogspot.in/2013/04/self-actualization-by-ones-self-for.html), and “Awareness and Resilience Management (ARM): Arming for Success and Happiness in Life”, Strategy Musings, February 3, 2013 (http://cbrao2008.blogspot.in/2013/02/awareness-and-resilience-management-arm.html). These blog posts discussed the approaches for self-awareness. The blog posts focused on individuals in a broader perspective rather than on leaders, per se (individuals, of course are leaders, and vice versa). There are two interesting concepts that the author would like to propose in this blog post. The first is whether an increase in awareness leads to a correlated increase in self-awareness. The second is whether self-awareness is enhanced or impeded by awareness, especially at leadership level.

As regards the first, the comprehensiveness of one’s awareness largely determines how well awareness leads to self-awareness. If one, for example, gets focused only on material aspects of professional life or personal life, it is unlikely that one would be appreciating the need for self-awareness. Self-awareness has a significant philosophical and spiritual content of which one would need to be aware of; this helps one to be appreciative of the need for self-awareness, and the paths towards that. As regards the second, individuals tend to lose self-awareness as they become more aware of the material aspects of success or failure. Success blinds one to one’s weaknesses and the need to overcome them while failure may cause one to lose confidence in one’s strengths and remain vulnerable to one’s weaknesses. As one moves on the leadership journey or the broader life journey, one would need to recognize development of self-awareness as an important component of developing awareness. 

Outcomes as inputs

While awareness and self-awareness can be developed as conscious processes, outcomes are important inputs in the awareness journey. The simplest example of outcome-driven awareness development is the examination system. The success or failure, and the rank achieved in each case acts as a trigger for enhancing one’s awareness. As one moves from broad generic school level courses to more focused college and university courses, and thereafter to industrial, business or academic employment aptitude tests help develop self-awareness. Outcomes in work environment and in leadership journey become harder to relate, despite all the efforts to define accountability and responsibility. Individuals would need to possess an elevated and discerning sense of outcomes as related to their contributions or non-contributions as part of the self-awareness journey.

At individual level, there are three imperatives for awareness and self-awareness balance. The first is a determination to be aware and self-aware. This can be achieved through a quest for all-round knowledge on one hand and an openness of mind on the other hand. Curricular and extracurricular learning and on-work and off-work learning need to be strong components of the awareness processes. The second is an ability to be sensitive to quantitative and qualitative cues. The second is achieved through a conscious processing of the external realities and underlying drivers. The third is a willingness to introspect oneself vis-à-vis expectations and improve to set right expectations and achieve right results. Awareness without self-awareness could be misleading while self-awareness without awareness could be paralytic. Both need to coexist in a virtuous humility canopy.   

Authentic humility

Awareness which leads to knowledge and competencies, and self-awareness which leads to self-improvement are the ideal combination to make an individual or a leader hugely successful. The key to sustaining such success lies in humility; humility that teaches one that success need not be worn on one’s sleeve, humility that teaches that failure is a result of lack of humility, humility that teaches that there can always be scope for self-improvement, humility that teaches one to respect others, and humility that enables development of bigger individuals or leaders than oneself. It is important to note that if power and presence are required in certain contexts, they are effectively provided by stature and humility as much as by knowledge and execution. In a recent pre-launch curtain raiser of his animation super movie Kochadaiiyaan 3D (Vikram Simha in Telugu), the superstar and hero of the movie, Rajinikanth said that Kamal Hassan was a great technical actor who was perhaps the right one for such a technical movie (dubbed as India’s first performance capture photorealistic film) but God has desired that Rajini should do that. The humility of the superstar was not lost on the huge audience.

Like most emotions or soft skills, humility also can be affected and not real. Individuals can put up a charade of humility. However, authentic humility is easily distinguished from affected humility. Self-awareness is the key to genuine humility. It enables people to overcome their shortcomings through greater and better awareness, and appreciate others’ superiority or need for support to others. A self-aware leader creates success by working with and leveraging the capabilities of others capable peers. Mahatma Gandhi’s humility helped him reach out to the nation on one hand and work with other capable leaders on the other. At the institutional level as well, successful institutions which are humble are likely to achieve far greater and sustainable success than other institutions which are smug on success or impervious to criticism. If Toyota had to face unexpected recalls it was due to a belief that the best was always being done and if Toyota still retained brand equity and went on to achieve a global record production nearly of 10 million vehicles last year, the reason lies in its humility to accept that even the best was not good enough, and there was scope for self-improvement.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on May 11, 2014    

Management of Perceptions: The Essence of Human Dynamics

Life is a game of chance between perception and reality. Nature is reality but human nature is largely one of perception. Human beings struggle to discover the ‘real’ you or me, in the process, viewing perceptions as the realities. Reality is the true situation that actually exists in life while perception is the way one notices the true situation in life. The enlightened or the ‘jnani’, as defined in a Hindu philosophical sense, perceives reality as the reality and also is open in bringing out the real person. Given that most individuals fail to reach or do not wish to reach the state of enlightenment, perceptions are also different from realities. The conflict and contrast between the reality and perception underpins the challenges of day to day human dynamics and influences the course of organizational behavior. It is appropriate to, therefore, understand the implications of the reality-perception paradigm.

The discourse on perception and reality is carried out in two schools. One school holds that it is irrelevant to seek to discover what the reality is when an individual is a social and economic being, conditioned by several benchmarks and aspirations. This school maintains that in any organization, be it the family, educational institution or the employer, individuals are bound by certain common goals, the fulfillment of which is the responsibility and obligation of individuals, independent of their and their organizational realities. The other school believes that all human discontent and strife is because of the mismatch between reality and perception, both about oneself and the others. This school maintains that if only people understood the realities completely there would be greater equity and equanimity in human dynamics.    

Conditioners

Human life, though a creation of Nature, is not a natural life; it is a conditioned life. Social and economic conditioners modify behavior patterns to be externally perceived differently from the internal realities. They also blur the ability of individuals to at least note, if not analyze and improve upon, the realities. From an individual perspective, family and friends are the most significant conditioners that define one’s values, attitudes, aspirations and performance metrics. As a result, often individuals exist and live for the goals and aspirations set by the conditioners rather than those set by their hearts and souls. That said, it is neither wrong nor right to lead a conditioned life that looks after others’ interests rather than one’s own. As long as such living does not lead to major conflicts between perception and reality such conditioned life could be socially and economically fulfilling. To achieve that, individuals need to introspect for reality and adjust for perceptions.

Organizational life, a creation of human beings, on the other hand, is explicitly designed to fulfill the needs of the society and the economy. It is conditioned to perpetually grow. It does not matter if the team members are diverse in their educational and experience backgrounds and heterogeneous in their social and economic conditioning. Their objective is to fulfill organizational goals of serving the society and economy with appropriate products and services. Unlike in a purely individual life, a corporation must look after its interests by first and primarily serving the needs of the consumers. The individuals of an organization, ipso facto,  must serve the broader organizational goals. For that to happen, all organizational members must function harmoniously. Many times, organizations believe that salaries and incentives are the conditioners for such performance. However, the triggers are different.

Enablers

Organizations would be successful when they collaborate internally and compete externally. A successful organization would require each of its team members to be competitive in his or her trade but the organization cannot afford to have team members who compete with each other. For team members to be internally collaborative, communication is the key. For communication between people to be effective, trust is essential. Trust develops when people are perceived to be open and collaborative. The closed loop of collaboration illustrates that perceptions of collaborative behavior are essential to ensure a reality of internal collaboration. For an organization to be an effective competitor, internal collaboration is critical amongst various functions and individuals of an organization. Companies which practice concurrent engineering and coordinated delivery, for example, are more successful than those that are prone to sequential or stage-gated development and delivery.

Perceptions are the key enablers of collaboration. People constantly make judgments of each other’s behavior while they also tend to straightjacket themselves into certain behavior patterns. These range from affable to aggressive, and consensual to assertive, for example. In addition, people are often perceived in terms of both positive perceptions (for example, helpful, selfless, knowledgeable and empathetic) and negative perceptions (for example, unhelpful, selfish, pedestrian and arrogant). It is important for individuals and team managers to identify and reinforce contextually relevant positive traits and eliminate contextually counterproductive negative traits. The organizational challenge is two-fold: first, select people who have real attributes that are as close as possible to the desired organizational benchmarks and second, develop people so that their perceived behaviors are aligned to the desired organizational benchmarks.

Perception grid

Like all management challenges, perception management requires a conceptual and analytical framework. The 2X2 perception grid, which this blog post proposes, enables such conceptualization and analysis. The grid has on the X-axis Positive and Negative Perceptions, and on the Y-axis Enablers and Disablers. The four sub-grids that are possible are Enablers of Positive Perceptions (EPP), Enablers of Negative Perceptions (ENP), Disablers of Positive Perceptions (DPP) and Disablers of Negative Perceptions (DNP). Clearly, an organizational ecosystem that maximizes the EPP and DNP grids and minimizes the DPP and ENP grids is an ideal goal. This goal is easier set than achieved, however. There are two major conditioners for the suboptimal ecosystem. Firstly, people embed and exhibit specific and time-ossified personality types. Secondly, different organizational situations require different personality dispositions and individuals as well as managers may lack maturity and flexibility to adapt and change.  

Positive perceptions of a person essentially arise from one’s knowledge, how productively one deploys it, and how positively one communicates it. The level of positivity tends to be adversely impacted if any of the three factors is compromised. Negative perceptions of a person essentially arise from lack of knowledge, inability to apply available knowledge and a resistant approach to disseminate knowledge. The level of negativity tends to be further worsened if any of the three factors is further compromised. In both the cases, communication plays a major part. People in EPP and DNP grids are likely to be highly positive communicators while individuals in the ENP and DPP grids are likely to be negative communicators. The three determinants of communication are content, style and empathy. The positivity of communication is enhanced by the strength of content, the coherence of delivery and the trust created by empathy. The pathway to a collaborative team lies in reinforcing positive perceptions through the three positive traits and enabling positive communication through the three components.  

Perceptive ability

As opposed to the common ‘perception’ that perception is a state that is different from reality, perceptive ability denotes an ability to see or understand things quickly and correctly, especially things that are not obvious. An individual must have a perceptive ability to understand how one is perceived. The real ‘one’ has to be subordinate to the desired perception of one in the team context. In the field of teaching and public speaking, introverts tend to don the mantle of extroverts to fulfill their responsibility. Individuals who stray off their careers of aptitude reshape themselves to match up to their accountabilities and responsibilities. While one need not be either artificial or affected, one must understand how one must carry oneself gracefully and in a positively influential manner, based on the strategic context.

A virtuous organization would have not only more individuals who have positive traits but also those who promote positivity in relationships. The organization would be knowledge based, task-focused, performance-driven, relationship-oriented, communication-savvy and apolitical. The leaders would be evangelists rather than enforcers and mentors rather than managers. The individual team members, rather than analyzing themselves and others in a quest for difficult-to-discover realties, would endeavor to develop and appreciate positive perceptions. This is not to suggest that a collaborative organization is based only on positive perceptions and positive communication. As the blog post discussed earlier, one has to be positively real in terms of knowledge and its deployment and its dissemination as well as in terms of content, style and empathy of communication. There can be no reality compromise on these six critical factors of positive perception.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on November 16, 2013  

 

Organizational Dynamics: Social Forces and Interpersonal Skills

Organizations are structures created to bring together people who possess requisite competencies and attitudes to deliver common organizational objectives for the companies they represent. The theories of organization have evolved over the years to identify appropriate methods and approaches, and tools and techniques by which an organization can function efficiently and effectively. The need for such theories arose because some of the fundamental and essential building blocks of organization such as departmental arrangements, performance management systems, business priorities, leadership opportunities while ensuring organizational delivery also generate forces of impedance. This, coupled with the fact that people tend to have dissimilar backgrounds despite sharing common criteria and objectives makes people management in an organization truly challenging and complex.    

Several types of organization structures have been devised to enable organizational dynamics that support rather than impede business objectives. Functional, geographic, business, project, matrix, and flat organizational structures are deployed to meet specific requirements. It has, however, been found that structures rarely solve anything by themselves and management of interpersonal relationships is something that has enduring substance and challenge. This blog post hypothesizes that organization being a social structure at its core interpersonal management needs to recognize and understand the social forces that operate in an organization. While interpersonal skills are important to ensure organizational harmony, the social forces in an organizational setting must first be understood.

Social forces

Just as an industry has competitive forces that impact firm performance, organizations also have social forces that impact team and individual performance. Similarly, just as there could be industry specific generic competitive strategies, there would be generic organizational strategies to manage the social forces effectively. Social forces in themselves fall under two categories, neither of which is necessarily bad nor good on an individual basis. Collectively, however, one set of social forces that are called Type A Forces collectively generate impedance while the other set called Type B Forces generate synergy. Both the types do exist in organizations. The challenge is to enable Type B Forces.

Type A Forces are typically five in number, and have a significant impact on how people, teams, departments and domains work together in a firm. These are rivalry, paradoxes, conflicts, misalignment and silos. It is easy to appreciate that each of the five forces is a natural corollary of organizational diversity while together they form a counterproductive set. Type B Forces, on the other hand, are inherently more positive, individually as well as collectively. These are collaboration, clarity, harmony, alignment and “one firm” as an operating paradigm.

Individual comparison makes it clear why Type B Forces are eminently more desirable for an organization. Collaboration, as opposed to rivalry, enables synergy of mutual strengths. Clarity as compared to paradoxes avoids loss of time and effort on confusing paths. Harmony as contrasted with conflicts ensures positivity and fulfillment. Alignment helps the value chain function seamlessly while misalignment leads to broken processes. And finally, when specializations and departments turn into silos processes slow down in an organization while the organization functioning as one firm works with synergy.

Generational styles

Type A and Type B Forces are not new to discover or aim for in organizations. They have been in existence from the very beginning of organized activity. Over time, conservative and non-competitive organizations are characterized by a preponderance of Type A Forces while proactive and competitive organizations are characterized by a preponderance of Type B Forces. Leaders have tried to manage these forces with different management styles. These styles are both the causes and result of the respective forces, and often represent generational differences in people management philosophies of managers and leaders.

Certain leaders facilitate and manage the Type A Forces in an organization by their Command and Control Style (CCS). Leaders adopting the CCS model simply direct people to obey. They typically let the Type A Forces build up and when they feel that such forces have become inimical to the organization they used their CCS model to root out the negative forces. This approach works in spurts, and is both a cause and a result of Type A Forces. In fact, team members who are observant of the CCS model adopt that in their own behavioral approaches leading to greater generation of Type A Forces.

Certain leaders facilitate and manage the Type B Forces in an organization by their Influence and Deliver Style (IDS). Leaders adopting the IDS model consciously inculcate in their people positive aspects of collaboration, clarity, harmony, alignment and one firm. They articulate a shared vision, detail out a workable strategy and demonstrate execution through constant employee engagement.  They are observant of the emergence of Type A Forces and work towards converting them into positive Type B Forces. As with the CCS model, team members who are observant adopt their own positive behavioral approaches, creating a virtuous organizational ecosystem.

Interpersonal skills

In the context of the foregoing, it is easy to observe that interpersonal skills would tend to be more impactful in an organizational ecosystem that has IDS leadership model and Type B Forces. In ecosystems marked by CCS models and Type A Forces, interpersonal skills act as temporary palliatives. The effort must therefore be focused on creating a positive organizational ecosystem that enables the full play of interpersonal skills. That said, there is considerable misreading of what interpersonal skills mean in an organizational context. While these are, no doubt, social skills they are not all about being nice to each other. In an organizational context, they have certain deliverables too.

Interpersonal skills, though falling under the category of social skills, are driven by technical or professional competencies. In today’s competitive world, managing people or partnering people is impossible without an ability to understand and analyze issues and present solutions. Strange as it may seem, competency is the foundation of successful cultivation of interpersonal skills. The foundation of being skilled interpersonally lies in the ability to build trust and rapport. Trust and rapport between individuals, whether they are colleagues or bosses and subordinates, are built based on three fundamental appreciations.

To be acceptable in an organizational setting, one should be aware that an issue or a problem exists, should be able to understand the ramifications and empathize with the other person who has the problem. This ability to build trust and rapport comes with the technical and professional competency to grasp problems and issues. In the absence of such an ability, the statements made by different individuals and departments  to each other in the ordinary course of business become positions of silos, rather than approaches of collaboration. Competency and trust thus coexist but can find the linkage only when people are able to connect through communication.

The third equally important enabler of interpersonal skills is communication. Communication, in an organizational context is not a matter merely or solely of language or grammar, which, of course, are nice to have. Communication is relevant and complete only when it comprises an equal and equitable measure of listening and speaking, enabling both the parties to communication developing a common platform, from which they can work together.  

Skill triad

Successful organizations approach organization dynamics in a holistic manner. While organization structures are drawn up to meet business needs, the real emphasis will be on creating an organizational ecosystem that promotes the positive Type B Forces of collaboration, clarity, harmony, alignment and one firm concept, managed by an Influence and Deliver leadership style. In such a solution, interpersonal skills are developed on a triad of professional competencies, trust and rapport building and communication. Organizational efficiency and effectiveness require a holistic approach as outlined in this blog post.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on December 30, 2012