Could You Be Replaced By an App? – #3: Do Your Stakeholders Trust You to Solve Their Problems?

Last week, we provided tactics for building a bridge to the business. Click here if you missed it.

This week, we explain what might happen when your level of communication with the business unit you serve increases, and how it could make or break their trust in you.

Read on to learn how to keep the trust of your business stakeholders.

When you take the time and make the effort to build bridges to the business, your level of communication with the business unit you serve will increase. It is very likely that you will get phone calls from well-meaning managers who say things like, “Our team isn’t getting along. Can you do some team-building training?”

Their intent is to address some type of problem, and the good news is that they trust you to solve it for them. As we discussed last week, though, more training requests may not be exactly what you want. If you excitedly rush in with the trendy training program du jour, you might really miss the mark and lose some of that trust.

An engineer would no more design a bridge without surveying the land than a training professional should design a training program without fully understanding the problem it is supposed to address.

Before agreeing to do training, or putting pencil to paper to design a new program, do a thorough needs analysis.

In the T+D Magazine article entitled Creating ROE: The End is the Beginning, Wendy relates a real-life example of how she took the initial training request and translated the true needs.

Read the full text of the article on our website, or log into our Resource Library to download the article as a PDF.

Join the Discussion

Have you earned the trust of your business stakeholders, and if so, what are you doing to keep that trust? We’d love to know. Here are some ways to join the conversation: