People skills

Now more than ever, an organisation is the sum of its relationships. The essence of trusted professional relationships is evolving in response to the challenges of increasing complexity. Truth and trust are harder to achieve, and more valuable.

In advice-giving businesses relationships are also the major driver of commercial activity. We’re all in sales now, whether transactionally or not, striving to influence the thinking and actions of another.

We explored these points here seven years ago in the context of future AI, under the title Integrity. Trusted advisors still need tech resources, tech skills, and most importantly tech awareness, but to hold ground and to enable growth, the deepening of client relationships is essential.

Progress is fuelled by challenges, such as the deluge of data, the management of automation, IT transition, new paradigms of truth, clouds of distracting chaff, structural over-capacities in markets, competitive alternative business models, disintermediation, and rapidly evolving global digital marketplaces – they all contribute. Meanwhile highly matrixed and complex global organisations with significant alliances make individual trusted relationships harder to maintain, a problem exacerbated by an ever-present stream of corporate restructurings.

What we’re learning about the brain has implications for how we work effectively with peers, clients and others. Building deeper, stickier relationships remains a key strategic imperative for all, yet one that business and law schools don’t teach.

Most relationship management or sales training offered to employees ignores key truisms about human behaviour.

Sincere and trusting personal relationships in the real world are a human speciality, a piece of the jigsaw that is unique to us. Trusted professionals need those abilities, and their brands need that promise to be certain.

The neurosciences point to the fact that we are unaware of most of our reactions to others, and of others’ perceptions of us, and that it takes deliberate effort to become aware of them.

Especially in uncertainty, when someone engages bluntly with us we tend to react pre-consciously, activating fight or flight responses before we listen. Progress demands good chemistry, getting to know each other, finding shared references, establishing rapport, then seeing how we might work together.

With access to leading research from clinical and social sciences, Bale Crocker offers coaches who have trained with the world’s leading experts in the fields of affective neuroscience, psychology, and behavioural economics to help our client professionals to:

• Shift from presenting to persuading
• Increase and protect revenues by upskilling from transactional salesperson to trusted advisor
• Introduce the concept of meta programs to tap into those of your most valuable clients
• Develop key skills in behavioural adaptability to quickly build rapport and justify trust
• Influence others positively, generate common purpose, and gain buy-in to ideas
• Build lasting credibility with clients, peers and seniors

In physical and virtual formats, we offer several tried and tested coaching workshops, run in a highly experiential way over a number of short sessions that allow space to reflect, embed, and reinforce learning. We use a panel of experienced buying professionals to roleplay real-world simulations with delegates, as well as to provide honest evaluation and feedback, with a plan for improvement.

A small confidential group dynamic also offers the opportunity for participants to learn from each other’s experiences, to work together on business development challenges, and to develop best practice.

Sharing some of the science behind human behaviour, and using cutting edge profiling instruments and tools, we help Business Development leaders to truly understand effective relationship building in a modern context: people first.

Professionals can fail to engage because they’re trying to impress their audience with knowledge rather than trying to relate to them as people. Correctly identifying someone else’s preferences and responding appropriately is crucial.

Our expertise addresses core needs such as:

• Developing distinctive client relationships
• Digital leadership vision and strategy
• Relationship management
• Trust-based selling
• Impact and influence
• Negotiation dynamics
• Presentation skills for business development
• Humanized leadership
• Personal influence skills
• Intercultural and inter-generational awareness.

John Bale will be waiting to hear from you on +44 330 6600 164 or at [email protected].

Our Resources page has more on these topics.