Maureen is the executive liaison with her company’s designated ad agency, which turns out brilliant and effective campaigns. But it annoys her that Henry, the agency’s account director, is difficult to reach and often waits until the last minute for Maureen’s input. All too often, Maureen has found herself working late hours to accommodate Henry’s schedule.

Brian feels frustrated because his department’s senior VP practically watches over his shoulder while he’s working. Being the new guy in the department, Brian doesn’t want to make waves; but he doesn’t know how to get his boss to let him work without so much supervision.

These scenarios sound familiar? They are but sampling of the seemingly infinite number of ways in which our business relationships can go astray through a lack of understanding or a lack of flexibility in seeing a relationship as a common alliance toward a shared goal.

The Answer: A Designed Alliance

Yet each of our meaningful relationships is exactly that—an alliance—and the concept of the “designed alliance" has emerged as a framework to intentionally think about and structure our relationships as alliances in order to give the parties the greatest chance for success and enjoyment.

Though the principles of designing an alliance have obvious application to personal
relationships, they can be particularly valuable in business and corporate settings. Many formal business relationships may be clearly “designed" on paper, but reveal a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in practice. And some of the most important alliances within organizations are ad hoc or very loosely defined, and they can respond especially well to some intentional design.

Consider Maureen and the ad agency’s account director. By moving beyond the give-and-take of their contract, they could intentionally design their working relationship as an alliance around the common goal of their mutual success. In doing so, they could find a way to set realistic performance goals and deadlines for Henry that take into account Maureen’s needs as well.

Brian and his department SVP also could design an alliance, in which Brian could communicate his goal of working independently and his boss could share his own concerns about the quality of the department’s output. Together they could work out an explicit set of goals so Brian could be working toward his objective while his boss had some security that the work was getting done well. Bringing the tools of alliance design—conscious communication and the willingness to listen and compromise around a shared goal—is particularly effective as a means to empower a relationship to serve all the parties. By consciously creating an “alliance," the process instills the understanding that “we are in this together," which is the touchstone of a successful relationship.