Many promising international partnerships wither and die in very early phases of meetings and exploring synergies. The cause is often unclear to the baffled partner actively seeking the alliance, as they will seldom receive direct feedback. Common symptoms include: After initial expressions of interest and desire to pursue the relationship, the targeted partner suddenly withdraws, contact people become unavailable, proposed meeting dates are inconvenient, and/or people are too busy to proceed right now. The real cause is generally that the partner seeking the alliance has inadvertently offended their prospective partner. Our experience and research has uncovered the most common failure modes in these early relationships.

What We Do:

For executives, managers and employes actively involved in the new relationship, we deliver workshops and personalized coaching to help you understand what can go wrong in the early relationship-building phase and how to be successful.

“Distance dynamics” – predictable dysfunctional dynamics that can derail any long distance business relationship.

• “Stuff It Syndrome” -- An inevitable consequence of headquarters, or one partner, fully developing and attempting to implement a plan or process across other partners without building relationships and involving them.  Stuff It Syndrome is rarely overt. It is expressed through confusion, foot dragging, helplessness, seeing insurmountable obstacles, and finding the flaws.
• The illusion of technologically linked “Dream Teams”— The reality is that  geographically separated organizational units or partners who never spend time together building relationships will inevitably develop dynamics that can stall or de-rail the initiative. These are manifested through forming suspicion, distorted communications, us-and-them, finger-pointing, conflicting agendas, formation of myths and rumors.

National cultural differences – what they are and how they cause problems in the earliest stages of forming a new international business relationship. We will also help you understand the three key areas in which things most frequently go wrong and how to prevent or manage issues

• Introductions and first meetings 
• When and how to get down to business
• Framing and arriving at the agreement    

 We will work with you so you can do it right from the start!