Helping Your Partners Help You: Using the Power of Positive Influence
Alliances, partnerships, indeed any type of collaborative relationship work on influence. It is the force that is used to help partners prioritize for you, to get executives to allocate budget to your effort, and to create champions. Alliance professionals use positive influence to create alignment internally and with partners and to find creative solutions to problems. Positive influence is what we use to earn the right to lead when we have no authority to do so. It is key to shifting mindsets from that of control and adopting the behaviors required in the business ecosystems companies operate in today.
Positive influence is the currency of business now that customers, partners, and team members all have practically infinite choices. This cross-industry master class explores how to develop your ability to use positive influence to create value for all concerned. It involves redefining your boundaries and purposefully building mutually-beneficial relationships throughout the ecosystems essential for success. We'll explore the norm of reciprocity and how to use the tool of relationship currencies to help your partners help you.
Following an introduction to the art of positive influence, participants break into small groups to analyze a non-industry specific case study of a codevelopment, cocommercialization alliance. The participants then reconvene as a group to discuss their analysis and learn from one another. These learnings include:
- Appreciating the principles of positive influence and how to use them to help your partners help you
- Using influence to help people see problems differently and arrive at innovative solutions
- Appreciating the human response to the norm of reciprocity and how to use it to create value for customers and partners
Speaker:
Jeffrey C. Shuman CSAP, PhD
Co-Founder, The Rhythm of Business
Professor Emeritus of Management, Bentley University
Jeff is an educator and trusted advisor to executives who are building, leading, and managing alliances and partner networks. His mix of operational, consulting, research and classroom experiences allow him to blend the theoretical with the practical, providing useful, easily implementable and repeatable advice.
At The Rhythm of Business he partners with global companies in multiple industries to advance their alliance and collaboration management capability. Consulting engagements focus on driving results through enabling all functions of the business to work effectively with their partners throughout the lifecycle. He works with senior executive teams to shape partnering strategy, enable operational and organization readiness, and implement overarching governance. Partnering professionals benefit from his ability to quickly diagnose underperforming alliances, and accelerate the path to profitability. Customized education and training bring alliance and collaboration skills to all who interact with partners.
Jeff has been a member of ASAP since 2002. He was involved on the teams that developed the Certificate of Achievement - Alliance Management (CA-AM) certification and the CSAP certification and contributed to the Handbook of Alliance Management. He frequently presents at ASAP and other organization's conferences and events. Together with business partner Jan Twombly, he has a rich history of developing and publishing strategic and practical thinking that advances the art and science of partnering and alliance management.
Jan Twombly, CSAP
President
The Rhythm of Business
Jan Twombly, Certified Strategic Alliance Professional (CSAP), is president of The Rhythm of Business, a service provider with core expertise in strategic alliances, alliance management, and collaboration. For more than 20 years, she has been developing and sharing thought leadership to enable success through partnering and alliances.
Twombly is a trusted advisor to leaders in both industry and academia, helping to develop their organizations' partnering and alliance strategies and operations. She offers education, training, and mentoring services to build the mindset, skillset, and toolset needed to succeed. Her clients count on her to advise on establishing new alliances, to develop alliance management organizations and practices, and to step in when alliances are in trouble. Data-driven, contextual assessments of complex alliances provide deep insights that solve problems and drive measurable improvement. Digitizing workflow helps alliance managers scale and optimize their work.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), overseeing their editorial and content strategy. She is a frequent contributor to Strategic Alliance Quarterly, regularly speaks on collaboration and partnering, and authors The Partnering Guide blog and numerous whitepapers at www.rhythmofbusiness.com.