Design Your Professional and Personal Relationships for Success
Photo provided by Unsplash.
Let's talk about the "designed alliance." I recommend it to everyone I coach, and we often work together to apply it in both personal and professional relationships.
(Bonus: Read to the bottom of the page to download a free designed alliance template)
Why Create a Designed Alliance?
Allies and advocates are essential for your leadership success. To build ally and advocate relationships, you need to create collaborative relationships. To create collaborative relationships, you have to clarify, “Here’s what I need from you. What do you need from me?” The designed alliance is a tool that helps you do that.
There are a few things that make this tool especially powerful:
It can work with any relationship: personal or professional
It is a simple concept to grasp, yet it can address complex situations. As long as there is an agreed upon goal and an agreement that we want to work together, this will serve you.
It is an “assumption buster.” You will catch details that might otherwise get overlooked.
What a Designed Alliance Is
A designed alliance is an informal agreement between two or more people. It is a communication tool for when they are pursuing a common goal. In the alliance:
everyone clarifies and agrees to what the goal is,
how they are going to achieve it,
how they will communicate with each other in the process,
and how they will celebrate success once achieving the goal!
How to Create a Designed Alliance
Clarify and agree to the goal. When teams (either at work or home) aren’t pursuing the same goal, they can fall apart. Worse yet, they fail to achieve what matters. So start here: "What are we trying to achieve?" "Why does it matter?" If that’s not clear, ask, “What pain point are we trying to relieve?”
How will we measure it? Ask, “How will we know that we’ve made progress?” Create a process to inspect what you expect.
Who does what, and when? Part of the how is clarifying who handles what. Then clarify when they will do it. This might be about a sequence of events (after A happens, so-and-so will do B). It could also be about hard deadlines (we’ve got to wrap this up by X).
How will the team communicate? Get clear on which communication channels you will or won’t use. Email? Slack? Trello? Phone? Zoom? Stay consistent or important messages will get lost. Also, clarify when and how the team will check in to communicate on progress or obstacles.
How will we celebrate success? To help motivate your team, agree upon how you will recognize completion of the goal. An office party? A shared dinner? A stand up meeting that points out significant contributors? Celebrating success is an easy way to put positive energy back into your people. Don't miss this.
Here are some more points I learned about designed alliances. Shout out to former International Coaching Federation Board Chair Sarah Smith for sharing these:
Whatever you ask of the other person you should be ready to offer.
A designed alliance is organic. It will probably need to change over time, busting assumptions again and again.
Approaching people and/or projects with intentional design can create a framework for trust to grow rapidly.
This is about being authentic not just acting authentic.
For Reflection:
What relationships in your life would benefit from a designed alliance?
What assumptions need "busting" in that relationship?
How can you create that conversation?