Strategic Alliance Mastery

If you think back over your own life experiences, you’ll probably notice that it’s nearly impossible to influence someone you’re fighting with. In contrast, it’s much easier to influence someone you have a great relationship with and a high degree of trust.

So the first step in influencing without authority is to build strong relationships with your stakeholders. The Micro Communication Skills give a robust toolset for building strong relationships.

As professionals, we think of ourselves as problem solvers. In fact, that’s what we get paid to do.

So it’s no surprise that people often jump into problem solving before they understand the complex landscape of the issues, interests and goals of multiple stakeholders.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming rather than investigating.

This module includes these essential information gathering tools:

• Finding Real Issue and Real Interests
• Finding Mutual Outcomes
• Using the Self, Other and Observer Perspectives

In multi-party stakeholder situations, it’s essential to understand what the real issues of each party are - what the real problems that they want to solve are - before doing anything else.

And it’s equally important to understand what each party really wants to achieve - what their real motivations, drivers and goals are.

Without those two aspects clearly understood and agreed upon, it’s easy to waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems and working to achieve suboptimal outcomes.

So this tool provides a step-by-step process for finding the real issues and real interests.

Even once you’ve found the real issues and real interests of each stakeholder, different stakeholders often have conflicting interests - especially in negotiations that involve stakeholders from different functions or organisations.

That’s just a fact of life.

This can lead to gridlocked situations, where each party is locked into achieving their own outcomes.

The trick to resolving these gridlocks is to find mutual outcomes - the higher-level objectives that everyone can agree that they are working towards together.

Once mutual outcomes have been established, it becomes easier to negotiate the details of how each party can achieve their goals, or compromise on goals, within that overarching context.

So this tool provides steps for finding and agreeing on mutual outcomes in multi-party negotiations.

Being able to see the world from different perspectives is a fundamental tool in emotional intelligence.

It’s also a fundamental tool in influencing:

• The Self perspective gives us a clear view of our own point of view. (Most people are naturally good at adopting the Self perspective.)
• The Other perspective provides a way to step into someone else’s shoes and truly understand the world from their point of view. (Many people are weak at truly adopting the Other perspective). By effectively stepping into the Other perspective, we gain a wealth of valuable insights that can be used in every aspect of relationship management and influencing.
• The Objective perspective allows us to step back and get a systemic view of the situation. (More systemic thinkers tend to be good at adopting this point of view, but without first having accurate information about the Self and Other perspectives, the data used in their systemic perspective can be flawed.) By first gathering good information and then stepping back to the systemic perspective, people often gain new insights into solving complex problems.

While there are many different approaches to influencing strategies and tactics, in broad terms they can be broken down into two extremes: Machiavelian and collaborative.

Machiavelian approaches take a win-lose stance, are manipulative and tend to break relationships. Thus they tend to produce short-term gains for one side and long-term losses for both sides. This is clearly not the right approach for managing long-term stakeholder relationships.

Collaborative approaches take a win-win stance, are collaborative, and build relationships over time. Thus they tend to produce both short-term and long-term gains for all parties.

In our module on Influencing Strategies and Tactics, we do a deep-dive into collaborative influencing strategies and tactics, and provide frameworks and tools for mapping out and executing effective influencing plans.

Having said that, from time-to-time, other stakeholders may (intentionally or unintentionally) use Machiavellian influencing tactics, also known in negotiation as “hard moves.” So we also teach how to recognize and respond to negotiation hard moves - pivoting from heading into a downward spiral of escalating Machiavelian tactics back to a more collaborative approach that builds relationships and builds long-term results.

The overall result is the ability to to think strategically about influencing strategies, and adopt the right tactics with each stakeholder at the right time.

Scientists, clinicians and other professionals are trained to seek objective facts, and are promoted for their ability to ‘be right’.

Which is great in certain situations. 

But when it comes to communicating with colleagues, the ability to adopt a mindset of curiosity is a powerful tool for opening up conversations and having effective dialogues. With this ability, people will be better able to avoid futile right/wrong discussions and binary options when seeking solutions.

When conflicts or difficult situations come up, we generally have an immediate interpretation of what was going on for the other person, and act as if our interpretation were true… without checking with the other person what was going on for them.

This tends to lead to irreconcilable differences and conflicts that never get fully resolved (even if they get ‘forgotten’).

The Reality Check tool is a simple yet powerful process for having a conversation to resolve a difficult conflict or misunderstanding.

It gives people a way to address the real issues, get to the root problems, and truly solve conflicts - while building relationships.

Whether it’s agreeing on policies and compliance, or simply figuring out how you can most effectively work with another individual, having a clear and agreed-upon set of criteria for working together is essential for a smooth-running operation.

Our Performance Criteria tool provides simple steps for having a conversation with another person (or organisation) to negotiate and agree upon how you’ll work together.

Rather than taking an authoritative approach of “you will do it this way”, it allows for effective negotiation of agreements and operating practices that work for all parties.

Sometimes we do things that break the trust others have in us. It’s usually not intentional, but the effects can be devastating on relationships and productivity.

The Rebuild Trust tool provides simple steps for rebuilding trust after it has been broken.

Almost everyone would agree that giving and receiving feedback are essential to ongoing improvement.

But many of us tend to avoid giving and receiving feedback, mostly because it’s uncomfortable; and for fear of breaking rather than building relationships in the process.

Our tools for giving and receiving feedback provide ways to navigate this process in a way that makes it both more comfortable and more effective.

Research shows that acknowledgment and appreciation have more effect on performance and quality of relationships than almost anything else.

And yet most people give and receive far more ‘constructive’ (i.e. critical) feedback than positive reinforcement. 

This tool serves two purposes. The first is a simple reminder and reinforcement of the importance of giving positive feedback. The second is a tool for making that positive feedback meaningful and memorable for the recipient.