From struggle to success: how to use aesthetics to improve business relationships

Sureya was the leader of a team which provided recommendations to external providers and services through her organization about the way in which those services could be upgraded to better meet the needs of her organization. Now, where do you think that in such a role she would often have the upper hand? With one particular client, she have gotten to a kind of pattern in which it always ended up to be more like hand wrestling match between her and the external provider about what sort of things they actually would upgrade on. She and her team had become quite disheartened and really didn't like ever attending these meetings and giving this feedback at their annual meeting.

Together with her team, she began to think about what she like this meeting to be like instead. What would she like the aesthetic of these meetings to be like? If they're going to do it that way, then what would they have to do together as a team to create this aesthetic? They agreed that they liked to be much more positive in terms of the way that they dealt with this particular external client. They decided that they would like to be kind of putting their foot first through the door and actually being much more positive about the requirement that they would exact from this provider. They thought that they might be able to create such an aesthetic in a number of ways. First of all, whereas in the past they've gotten to a habit of listening to the external providers speak first. They thought that they would take the floor first. They also thought about how they wanted to present a much more unified front to this provider. So rather than just sitting back and staring vaguely into the distance when they were speaking, they thought that they would actually very actively look at each other, kind of provide some of those macro-affirmations to one another when they went into these meetings. They also decided that they would take a completely different tack in terms of the way that they would give the story about what the external provider was expected to do. So they thought that instead of just listing the complaints in a sort of categorical way, that they would tell a broader story about why these upgrades were important and how they fit into the larger narrative of what the company was doing, and the larger strategic goals of the company, and how the external provider fit into these strategic goals.