Most people don’t realize that every relationship has a culture. You don’t usually think of culture operating at the relationship level, or driving individual behaviors, but it has the lead role. The key to capacity building is to maximize the resources that every person brings to the table. Most capacity building and performance improvement strategies don’t include guidelines for how people should encourage trust and transparency, confront and manage conflict resolution, make decisions, promote and support candor, generate mutual support and accountability. This area of “soft skills” is often left alone to be established by chance. When you consider how deliberately people manage operational strategies and skills, it’s amazing how little effort is placed on managing relationships with a focus on capacity building and performance improvement.

The fact is that the soft skills drive the hard results and so we tackle them head-on with skills and tools that embed candor, trust and transparency, and full access to the valuable resources they control.

Modern leadership development is more about creating behavior and norms that release power into the organization so entrepreneurial initiative develops and thrives at every level. Our management consulting approach to leadership development stands out by using the team rather than individual learning setting to embed leadership skills.

Our management consulting methodology puts every team member on a level playing field so individuals can’t use rank, power, or authority to drive team performance. This means he or she has to learn and practice relationship skills that maximize resources and promote individual and team performance improvement.

Our management consulting approach to team development gives every member a few weeks to learn and practice new candor skills in the workplace. Intact teams then complete a systematic process of evaluating the team’s purpose, defining soundest and actual team norms with action plans to close gaps, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and building profiles of each member’s behavior, its impact on team performance, and performance improvement goals. The process is rigorous and highly cathartic in relieving tensions and increasing mutual trust and transparency.

Our management consulting Cross-Team Development process is designed to manage even the most highly contentious cross-team relationships in objective terms. The process includes a progression of sessions where groups work alone and then jointly to clarify and consolidate views around soundest and actual relationships. Then together, the groups define strategies for achieving their highest team and individual performance improvement.

The process mitigates blame and focuses on the best possible conflict resolution. People begin looking for ways to be creative and collaborative. As prevailing assumptions are exposed and understood groups can shift from their actual to their soundest working relationship.

The conflict resolution process can be used for new teams seeking to establish trust and transparency at the outset, with existing teams wrestling with poor conflict resolution that blocks collaboration, and even with two individual wrestling with an impasse.