Module 4 is about building enduring relationships. Another key skill that as a leader in a technical organization, you need to develop. So you're expected to establish and maintain strong, enduring, effective relationships with all of your stakeholders. In this particular module, we're going to concentrate on customers, but the skills that we're going to learn about really are transferable to any of those stakeholders. Here's what's interesting relationship building and relationship maintenance are attributes that are visible and can be measured. And the reason why I say that they're visible to everyone that is observing, you, your management, the employees that you lead, your peers, and your customers. But on top of that, the expectation of an organization usually revolves around how well leaders can build and maintain effective, enduring relationships. Because it is those relationships and that trust that is foundational to those that help organizations move through conflict with customers, deal with challenging situations with the supply chain, have difficult conversations potentially with investors or shareholders or with each other. So don't be surprised that as you move up in your career and as expectations are set for you from your upper management, that they will expect that you're able to build very enduring relationships that then can be used to the benefit of the organization and the benefit of the stakeholder. Moving beyond enduring relationships is probably the nirvana of extreme relationship building and that is establishing partnerships. And a partnership is moving beyond a relationship. So if you think about sort of in the continuum of interacting with others. The first step is probably transactional. So there's no sharing of any kind of information other than that for what is needed to complete the transaction whether it be a question that you ask a help desk and the answer comes whether it be a set of monetary compensation for a service it's just it's basically one and done. So a relationship then is not one and done it's an ongoing connection that may or may not outlive the current circumstance so it isn't enduring. Most of the time when you're in a relationship, each partner has their own expectations of what that relationship is and what it means. And rarely do you share what those true expectations are, isn't that interesting? And then breakdowns occur when those expectations aren't met. So what I think about is a relationship. You build a relationship, let's say with a real estate agent that's going to sell your house or a salesperson that's going to sell you a car. You get to know them a little bit because you're interacting with them, it's an ongoing connection until you both kind of reach the goal which is selling your house or buying your car. Yet when you think about it, you really don't understand the full motivations and expectations of your real estate agent or of your car salesman. And they only know what you tell them so you're not necessarily sharing your full set of expectations. Once that I'll call it, it's a transaction but it's more in-depth than a transaction. Once that goal is met, you may walk away. You may remember that person for in the future I really enjoyed that connection, that relationship. I think I will use them again in order to maybe buy a new house or buy another car or I will refer them to a friend who's looking for that. Or on the other hand, a breakdown may occur you may not fully communicate. You may walk away from the car dealership because you just maybe didn't like the way you were treated, you didn't think that they listened to you. And you know that you can go someplace else. A partnership is a commitment to an ongoing relationship and this is very true right in your own personal life as well as in your professional life. You know that breakdowns are going to occur in a partnership. Both sides notice however you will also take steps to move beyond those breakdowns. You stay in connection, you figure things out together and each participant contributes to the success of the other in the world of business. You are going to be a little bit selective in who you create a partnership with in a lot of cases, you will have many relationships and they will be very fruitful for you and for the other side. But you're not going to invest the time and the energy that it takes to build a partnership, they're going to be very special individuals that you will do that to. There may be 1 or 2 customers or 3 customers in the course of your career that you establish a partnership, maybe peers, maybe leaders, or mentors to you. Again, it takes a much different level of energy and desire to be able to want to build a partnership. So let's talk about enduring customer relationships first. And these are going to be the ones that you are going to cultivate. You're going to have customers that are going to be with you for a month, a year, 5 years, and then you may get a different position, they may get a different position. And then you'll start all over again with a different set of customers yet in that amount of time that you are with them, you need to develop foundational trust ability to communicate and make sure that you have the same end goal in mind. So the first rule, there is no customer such there's no such thing as over-communicating the good and the bad. When you introduce yourself to a customer and you begin to forge a longer term relationship Be a useful resource. Don't always expect to be able to go to that customer with a set of questions to have them answered and not offer anything from you, from your side. What might they need from you? And lead with that before, what you need from them. To be honest at all times, that's just foundational, right. That is how you begin to build trust. Always meet your deadlines. You're going to say, well, that's impossible. And of course, it's going to be impossible in some situations. But that's your mindset with respect to this relationship. You're always going to meet your deadlines, especially those that where they ask you for information or where you've promised something to them. And it extends into your team because you're accountable for your team's ultimate performance. This one's interesting, eliminate surprises. I had a customer once and we made it our business such that neither one of us was surprised by information that would be then communicated later. So for example, we were going to have an official award fee meeting where the customers were going to give us maybe three hours of feedback on our performance and their level of satisfaction with us. Yet before any one of those meetings and there were multiple. My customer and I would get on the phone and we would talk, we would talk about how things were going, the level of satisfaction, what they were disappointed in. Such that when I sat in that meeting and by the way, my boss was also in that meeting. I was not surprised by a thing that they said. And that is really important because what that says is, hey, I'm telling you things as they occur. I'm over communicating if I have to, because you need to listen to these things that potentially need to be changed. Customers is just more than customers, think of them as human beings with lives, families, issues, successes because that's exactly who they are and probably more what they're thinking about. If you think they might be in a bad mood or might be a little bit tough with you. Maybe it is about you and your performance, but also think about them truly as humans and struggling with the same things that we all struggle with. They, we need to hold them accountable and responsible for what, for their part. But we don't put them on a pedestal so much, right. They are an equal part of this relationship and then have a vision of what you want, a partnership. If you were willing to take it one step further, what might that look like? So let's take this, a couple more steps and dive into taking this relationship which looks pretty intense already, right. You're committing a lot, you're building trust. You can even take it one step further. There's a book out there called Radical Candor and I bring it up here now because it's about getting feedback and being very open to honest feedback. So this idea that a leader is able to teach, but they're also value learning. And this book sort of explores how you would go about not only receiving difficult or critical or honest feedback, but also providing it as a tool to learn. I have a guest speaker that's going to be here in module five and he is going to refer to this book and he doesn't kind of in passing. But it's a terrific book, if you're interested in reading more about feedback. Feedback, actually, soliciting honest feedback, considering it and developing strategies to take action on that feedback. Is kind of an elevated version of moving towards partnership. In a relationship, you might listen to feedback and you may consider it or you may discard it or you may act on part of it depending on the importance to you and the organization. In a partnership, you are committing to listening to what your partner is saying and taking to heart the true meaning of that. This idea of customer satisfaction, which sort of is a result of developing a customer relationship. There's no guarantee of customer retention. Can be highly satisfied. Have a highly satisfied customer yet, depending on alternatives available to them. Changes in economic situations, global situations, customers may move away from you because even though what you had seemed very stable nd and trustworthy. If there is alternatives, it is a world of business and they may move on. Partnerships however, are living and breathing demonstrations of an attitude and a commitment that go beyond satisfaction and relationship. But here's a warning, not all customers as writ large stakeholders may not want to be part of a partnership and that's okay. But it's good to know that, right. Because partnerships take a lot of work. One more interesting idea is as you are moving up in an organization and you're empowering your team to do things that are a half a step up, half a level of. Having them explore more opportunities, more skills, give them exposure to different things. You may delegate some customer facing responsibilities. But before you do that beware, you need to be able to coach and mentor those employees that you will be giving this customer facing responsibility to. Because you want them to feel as much ownership as you do in that relationship and potentially going to a partnership. So, there may be team operating principles that you enact for how you deal with customers, customer conversations and feedback. Definitely delegate stretch assignments to your team, let your customer know you're doing that. Get feedback from them quickly. Is it working? Do they have concerns? And then give feedback to your team. Another interesting thing that I definitely learned in my time in industry is that there are so many more touch points to your customers than you know. You may think you may have some level of control of the conversations going on with the customer, the messages that you're sending. Yet, if you have a customer team that is reasonably large, let's say they're made up of maybe technical experts, financial experts, mission assurance experts. Software experts, your team and your team members in the execution of their job are going to be connecting and communicating with their level. Of customer. Which means when you're talking to your team about customer relationships, how you want to communicate those foundational things we talked about be honest over communicate. Be timely, be useful should communicate those to your team and expect them to act with those same attributes at their level with their customer representatives as you do with yours. So let's move on to the extreme relationship which is a partnership and what this means with respect to a customer relationship. There is a terrific book by Chip Bell Customers as Partners Building Relationships That Last. And I love this book because this is how he describes a partnership abundance, trust, dreams, truth, balance and grace. I bet those are none of the words you would have thought would be associated with a customer partnership. So let's quickly go through them. The first one abundance. In a partnership, partners think generously towards each other. They don't keep score. There's value to working together and the focus is on the relationship, not the transactional costs that may be going on every day. Making an effort to provide value based solely on the commitment of the relationship. So for example when visiting a customer, make sure you bring them something of value before you start the business conversation. And begin to ask the questions that you need to have answered. Show that you respect their time and their attention. Trust. This is the feeling that you get that whether they're in the room or they're not in the room, there's a level of confidence and assurance faith and fidelity. That you've surrendered the need for us a process so that again, it's not a scorecard. You have healthy candle. You welcome critical honest feedback without being defensive and you listen to understand. For example, this is one example actually that came from my history. My customer and I developed a communication path and before we had a partnership, we had a very good relationship. But what moved it sort of to the next level was this idea that I said I will over communicate. As long as you don't overreact, it'll be good and bad news and you'll get it within 24 hours. Even if I don't have any details but I need you to know and I know you want to know and I know we're going to sit there and think about it for a while. We might not have enough data to act on it right then and there. But you can count on me to over communicate. In the beginning when I started my side of this and I over communicated the other side had a tendency to overreact. And and we had to work it out. This is wait, I'm just telling you this and I don't know all the details yet. But I know you want to know and I'm going to tell you the minute I know more details and we just began to build on that foundation really of trust. The next dreams, this is having a joint purpose. A shared vision. An idea is do you really know what your customers vision and purpose are and do not even begin to assume it is similar to yours. Your vision as a leader, maybe to deliver the best technology on time, on budget to the delight of your customer. Your customers vision maybe to be the best manager of an industry partner that would be you, to get the most value to their customer, probably the military end user. So you have two really different visions. There is a nexus of where they come together and it's going to be about what success looks for both of you even though you are really working for sort of two different reasons. And it's understanding that it's having conversations about that. Truth, straight talk, honest conversation, candor and openness and they're valued. Authenticity, we talked about being an authentic leader in the last course, ask for feedback, check your ego at the door. So in this case I used this this element of building a customer partnership with with my customer. And we said our teams are really good and they're both really smart and they both are committed to getting the job done. However, being as smart and committed and dedicated as they are, there's going to be conflict. Okay, well that's good because we want differences of opinion. We want to get a couple of perspectives maybe before we make a difficult decision. Yet we took it on ourselves to manage our team's health because we thought that was incredibly important for us to support them, for them to know that we supported them. We also knew that we had to quickly maybe resolve some issues before they began to fester. And so the most important thing to us, the customer and I as partners was to make sure our teams feel empowered. And for them to know that it was okay to have difficult conversations and really have a little bit of conflict as they worked through resolution. But we were there, we supported them and that we would be there if they needed us. Balance, this is the pursuit of equality and it's over time. Equity quite frankly and it is this idea that balance just sort of happens. It happens because you're participating and you're participating in a way that both sides feel is proportional and appropriate. So this means that there's a level of respect and that it's elastic because balance isn't just perfectly level. Sometimes balance will become imbalance and move from one side to the other side. So it is a little bit elastic. So a partnership with a customer is actually resilient. It's not endurance, It's not over the course of time that you sort of develop this. It's the fact that you are resilient and you talk through and bill of levels of trust as that balance, maybe balance of power is moving from one side to the other. And you're able to resolve and rebound from setbacks as they are. And you understand that on both sides, that sometimes that balance of power is going to be on one side or the other side yet over time. And being resilient, that balance is sort of the ultimate idea that you're working towards. And then finally grace. So this is just the sense of ease of familiarity, norms of calm and composure in the way that you behave with each other, how you both act in times of trouble. So examples of this and in a customer environment your reactions when confronting and communicating difficult situations and outcomes. Can you both have a conversation a calm conversation about a very difficult situation with the goal to get the information that you need. So that the first thing you can do is look for a plan of attack. You're not blaming, you're not finger pointing, you're not looking for the list of individuals that that you can call in and wonder what went wrong. You're about wondering what the system did maybe to let the teams down. How do you improve that? So these customers partners as I said, this is a lot of work. And you will know those that you want to go further than a relationship with. Even if after a period of time they move on or you move on. Those partnerships last a career, the ones that I have made, they are still in play and I know I can call those people. And they have moved on, they have moved up their unbelievably successful now. But I know if I called them and wanted to interact with them, they absolutely would and they know the same of me. So next I want you to watch a video called, this is who you are. It's just a reminder about not stereotyping individuals and not putting people in boxes, your customers or stakeholders. All those that you interact with and what relationships and partnerships with. Then there is going to be a guest speaker, one of my good friends, Tom Colombo's and I'll introduce you to him. And he is going to talk on customers as partners and he has a great perspective and some good examples. So I hope you enjoy his talk as well, so I'll see you after that.
