The Business of Building Relationships

As a business professional, you should ask yourself: "What business am I in?". The answer is quite simple: if your business has anything to do with people – and ALL businesses do – you are in the business of building relationships.

Business Communication

Business communication is any communication used to build partnerships, intellectual resources, to promote an idea, a product, service, or an organization – with the objective of creating value for your business.

Negotiating

Negotiation is the  game of life and business, the lifeblood of relationships, and a positive way of structuring the communication process.  Whenever you attempt to reconcile differences, resolve disputes, manage conflict, influence others, establish or improve relationships you are negotiating.

Making Effective Presentations

To make effective presentations and communicate effectively, don't try to say all you know – say only what your audience needs to know. Sort out relevant data from a huge amount of available input and convey only what helps your audience take productive action. Turn data into information that has clear meaning and relevance to your audience.

Competing Skills

No business can be successful unless it places top priority on outdoing its competitors. Business has always been a battle. Companies which don't do their utmost to outcompete their rivals are likely go out of business sooner or later. You need to establish a position of competitive excellence if your business is to survive. A fundamental rule in crafting a competitive strategy is to view competition from the other player's viewpoints.

Entrepreneurial Skills

Entrepreneur is a person who habitually creates and innovates to build something of recognized value around perceived opportunities. Entrepreneurship is first and foremost a mindset. It is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur, every successful businessperson has been someone who's been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before somebody else did.

Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurial creativity is about coming up with innovative ideas and turning them into value-creating profitable business activities.

Entrepreneurial creativity = creativity × entrepreneurial action.

It is about coming up with ideas and converting them into innovative business activities.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a key to effective leadership. It refers to your capacity to recognize your own feelings and those of others, for motivating yourself, and for managing emotions well in yourself and in your relationships. Emotionally intelligent leaders are more likely to achieve results and are effective in dealing with the complexity involved in leading change and organizational transformation.

Leadership

Leadership is the process of directing the behavior of others toward the accomplishment of some common objectives. Leadership is imperative for molding a group of people into a team, shaping them into a force that serves as a competitive business advantage. Leaders know how to make people function in a collaborative fashion, and how to motivate them to excel their performance. Leaders also know how to balance  the individual team member's quest with the goal of producing synergy – an outcome that exceeds the sum of individual inputs.

Influencing People

In every organization and business activity, influential people succeed and non-influential people don't. You cannot influence someone unless he or she likes you in some way. People are motivated for their reasons, not yours. Rapport is the key to influence. Rapport and influence start with acceptance of the other person's point of view, their state and their style of communication. To influence you have to be able to appreciate and understand the other person's standpoint. And these work both ways: I cannot influence you without being open to influence myself.

Coaching

Coaching is the art and practice of inspiring, energizing, and facilitating the performance, learning and development of  the player.

The goal of coaching is to guide vision, urge excellence, and empower the one being coached – the player – through establishing a firmer connection with his or her inner authority. Coaching brings more humanity into the workplace. Effective coaching delivers achievement, which is sustainable. It also delivers fulfillment and joy from which both the individual and organization benefit.

Effective Listening

When asked what they consider the single most important factor for business success, many business leaders come up with listening. Your cannot establish trust and build relationships if you cannot listen.

Managing Cross-Cultural Differences

Culture is often at the root of communication challenges. Exploring historical experiences and the ways in which various cultural groups have related to each other is key to opening channels for cross-cultural communication. Becoming more aware of cultural differences, as well as exploring cultural similarities, can help you communicate with others more effectively. Next time you find yourself in a confusing situation, ask yourself how culture may be shaping your own reactions, and try to see the world from the other's point of view.

Cultural differences in multicultural teams can create misunderstandings between team members before they have had a chance to establish any credibility with each other. Thus, building trust is a critical step in creation and development of such teams. As a manager of a multicultural team, you need to recognize that building trust between different people is a complex process, since each culture has its own way of building trust and its own interpretation of what trust is.

Business Architect

Today's companies need business architects who can take a systems view of a business and build synergies. In today's knowledge- and innovation-driven complex economy, business architects are in growing demand.  To build a winning synergistically integrated organization, companies need cross-functionally excellent people who can tie several silos of business development expertise together, create synergies, design a winning business model and a balanced business system and then lead people who will put their plans into action... More