Corporate Coach
Relationship management – managing expectations (part I)
Elsabé Manning, Executive Coach, Success Factory
Management (one of the four pillars of emotional intelligence) is the ability to not only fully utilise emotions to set goals and create plans for self-motivation and to achieve your goals, but also to enhance rather than hinder your progress and to delay gratification and reward in order to focus on the task at hand.
The other three pillars of emotional intelligence are: self-awareness, self-management and social awareness. Emotional intelligence is the innate potential to feel, use, communicate, recognise, remember, learn from, manage and understand emotions.
All business is built on relationships
It takes a lot of time and effort to build and maintain lasting relationships, but it is extremely rewarding in the long run. You have to be prepared to commit yourself and expect not to always get what you want. Building bridges is one of the most fundamental and crucial of all strategies when climbing the corporate ladder. Successful people make it their business to heal broken or ‘at-risk’ relationships and they make every effort to build strong, lasting, well-maintained business, personal and intimate relationships.
Display the behaviour you expect from others. In other words, if you want respect from someone, then show them respect. If you want others to have compassion for you, then show compassion to them. Intimate relationships work on the same principle. If you want trust, love and respect from your partner, then you need to display those behaviours to them. It works like a boomerang – it comes back! Once you ‘get’ that, you will understand the basics of building relationships with anyone.
Relationships with others are extremely important when you are selling your skills, experience, products or services. No matter how good your skills and experience or your product or service, the key to your long-term success is your ability to connect with other people.
Some tips to remember when building and maintaining relationships:
- Develop long-term strategic partnerships. It is costly and time-consuming to negotiate and build new relationships – nurture and build the ones you already have.
- Develop an in-depth knowledge of your customer’s vision, strategies, programmes and projects. Your customer will feel valued and they will form lasting emotional and financial ‘attachments’ with your organisation if you do your homework and make an effort to truly understand their circumstances fully.
- Develop an understanding of the customer’s day-to-day activities so that you are in a better position to make win-win recommendations.
- Ensure that an appropriate selection of products and solutions are offered to your customers. Ensure that your products and/or services really satisfy their needs and that your advice was not self-serving.
- Employ emotionally well-balanced people – they serve your customers. This means that they need to have insight into and understand basic human behaviour to ensure that solid, long-lasting, trusting relationships are built.
Customers want strategic relationships with service providers that will truly serve them in some way. Customers are willing to pay big money to service providers who…
- solve their everyday problems;
- streamline processes;
- increase efficiencies;
- reduce costs;
- increase revenues;
- enhance their services and products in some way.
Managing expectations
Your expectations are ‘visions’ of a future state or action. We often do not express our expectations and yet, it is crucial in order to accomplish what we set out to achieve. Making your expectations known and making them clear is the only way you can ensure that the job gets done well and on time.
Expectations are a measurement of your success. Satisfaction is a measurement of how close you have come to meeting others’ expectations.
Job descriptions or explanations do not drive decisions and actions – expectations do.
There are three components to managing expectations:
- setting expectations;
- monitoring expectations; and
- influencing expectations.
Setting expectations
Our expectations are based on past experiences or insights gained from others or events – whether rational or valid or not.
Monitoring expectations
There is no way of knowing how to monitor expectations unless you ‘test’ them. You can test others’ expectations by dropping hints and clues of your next steps and watching how they react.
It is not possible to manage expectations effectively unless you monitor them by listening to the role-player who expressed the expectation in the first place. They may express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction or they may drop hints and clues – if they don’t, you need to ask their opinion on progress.
Influencing expectations
Once you have identified the expectation, you can start to influence (or manage) others’ expectations, because managed expectations drive your success. Everything else is secondary. If your roleplayer(s) do not understand that their expectations are irrational or valid, you need to ‘educate’ them by giving them a lot more information. It is through obtaining a lot more information and knowledge that people gain new insights and change their limiting beliefs, expectations and goals.
Tel: (011) 648-8969
Email: elsabe@successfactory.co.za
|
