Behavioural Patterns
How to behave in the interactions with your stakeholders
“In Enterprise Architecture roles, emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for more than 90% of a person’s performance and success.”
- Bard Papegaaij
It is your role as Enterprise Designer to ensure the overall enterprise landscape is designed for purpose and stays adaptive to changing market demands. To be able to do this, you need to collaborate with many people. Having no formal authority over most of your co-creators, you rely on your inter-personal skills to fulfil your enterprise-wide role. You need to be able to build relationships that go beyond the purely transactional. You need to help them trust you and see you as a partner and co-creator, not as an order-taker, supplier or external party with interests counter to their own. Most importantly, you need to realise that every interaction with a stakeholder, however fleeting, is a chance to influence their thinking and nudge their decisions in another direction.
The patterns in this section provide guidance on how to behave when interacting with your many stakeholders to build better relationships and collaboration.
You will learn things like:
- How to ask powerful questions;
- What you can do to improve your listening skills;
- How to build the trusted relations you need for your task.
The Behavioural Patterns are: