Influencing, Negotiating & Partnership

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Woody Allen once described love as a virus. In its ‘acute' stage the symptoms include intense attraction and boundless goodwill towards the other: there isn't a problem the happy couple cannot solve. Twenty years later, in the chronic stage of the ‘illness' the symptoms are characterised by irritation and an uncanny ability to row about everything. Whilst we are not encouraging people in different organisations to fall in love with each other, it is clear that when relationships are clean, we can eat problems for breakfast. The challenge of partnership is to build goodwill from the start and then maintain it over the lifetime of the arrangement, so that the problems that occur in even the best relationships don't become the seeds of its destruction.

Increasingly, we have to learn the partnership dance in order to win contracts or deliver on them. We may even need to look to creating a new breed of partnering relationships for growth with our competitors: co-opetition. Without the ability to work with others in productive partnerships we will be left behind.

How can you get yourself and others over the hump, beyond competition into co-operation? How do you get beyond competitive dynamics and clashes of interest? What we are discussing here is our ability to manage our relationships, the negotiation process, and ourselves. Successfully done, it leaves both the partnership and the people intact and productive. Badly done, it feeds the lawyers.

OPDC can help you and your team excel at partnership working. On a more basic level we will teach you how to build high trust relationships that will endure the test of time and co-operation. We will show you techniques that help you:

• Build rapport appropriately and quickly
• Experience and adopt a true win-win mindset so that you will be in productive, long-term relationships
• Be clear about your needs (then we will give you frameworks to help you go after them!)
• Manage your own emotions as well as those of others, so that you can remain in control of proceedings

On a more sophisticated level we can support you in establishing partnerships, negotiating SLA 's, developing a virtual organisation or team and with working out Team Charters and Blueprints.

We will help you become excellent at:

• Establishing partnerships
• Building sustainable relationships
• Negotiating agreements
• Looking for synergies
• Optimising opportunities

Two brief examples of projects we have worked on supporting people and organisations to develop their partnership working

A large facilities management organisation won a very large contract, which they were obliged to deliver in consortium that included their arch rival. OPDC helped the two management teams to come together to set up a new, joint management team for the new, virtual organisation. Together we launched the new organisation, agreed on Roles and Responsibilities, worked out the Service Level Agreements and –in the process- worked our way around various relationship dynamics.

A well-known IT company decided to change their strategic focus from ‘product selling' to ‘solution selling'. This meant that the sales force had to be developed to be able to work alongside customers, over time, to get to know their needs and offer them the right solution. It required partnership skills and frameworks, which the sales force acquired during an OPDC run Development Programme.