The Relational

Health Audit

Consulting & Leadership Development

What is it?
Developed over more than 15 years’ research and practice, the Relational Health
Audit, is a one-of-its-kind psychometric scorecard that helps clients assess the
quality and diagnose the state of relationships in the context of a group, an
organisation, between organisations, or simply between individuals. Tested in a wide
range of organisations and contexts, leading to improved relationships and
performance, the RHA offers a comprehensive and effective mechanism for
crystallising key relationship issues and enabling a structured discussion on how to
improve working relationships in a variety of contexts.

Why assess relationships?

In a world where products and services can be easily replicated, it is relationships
that offer organisations true competitive advantage. Performance, efficiency and
productivity, organisational effectiveness, organisational change and transformation,
risk, innovation, value creation, service quality and customer retention are all
decisively shaped by the strength and quality of relationships.

Leaders, managers and executives recognise the importance of relationships but

often lack adequate and accurate tools to assess them and a constructive language
to conduct structured conversations on how to improve them. Without those
capabilities, leaders find it hard to influence and shape relationships towards
improving performance and attaining competitive advantage.

Because often what gets measured gets done, the RHA helps make a stronger
evidence-based case for creating an environment that fosters and sustains effective
relationships.

Why is the RHA different?

Extensive application
There are many psychometric tools that explore the psychology of the self and
interpersonal relationships. But there are few tools and frameworks that assess
organisational relationships, and fewer still that are capable of generic application.
The RHA offers a way of analysing relationships and developing the preconditions for
relationships to thrive in any type of organisation.

Influencing relationships
The heart of the RHA is to enable leaders to influence relationships, thereby creating
the preconditions for effective relationships. This is done by helping leaders to
understand the characteristics of relationships that deliver the desired outcomes
and how best to cultivate such characteristics.
The underlying model: Relational Proximity
Our Relational Proximity Model considers five broad interrelated domains that are
integral in any relationship: contact, time, information, power and purpose. These five
domains can be analysed through the following five corresponding dimensions:

Directness: the extent to which presence is mediated and filtered, hence influencing
communication and a sense of connection.
Continuity: the extent to which a series of interactions progresses to a relationship,
hence enabling a storyline involving roots, momentum and commitment.
Multiplexity: the extent to which people know and accept each other, hence fostering
the appreciation of capabilities, challenges and salient contexts.
Parity: the extent to which power (in its many forms) is used fairly in a relationship,
hence building a sense of mutual respect and encouraging participation.
Commonality: the extent to which there is an alignment of purpose and goals, hence
fostering synergy, shared identity and the motivation to be involved.

The quality, strength and effectiveness of relationships – whether between

colleagues, team members, managers and subordinates, organisational hierarchies,
the organisation and its customers or suppliers, the frontline and service users, or the
organisation and its external stakeholders – are dependent on the optimality of the
five domains working in concert, which the RHA helps assess.

What is the RHA useful for?

Strategising: identifying key relationships and their development needs.
Relationships development: screening partners, aligning expectations
and finding common ground.
Relationships integration: building synergy between divisions in supporting mergers
and acquisitions, shared services integration and business process reengineering.
Improving business processes: designing interventions to achieve specific outcomes.
Assessing risks: reviewing risks and monitoring key risk indicators
in stakeholder relationships.
Monitoring: tracking perception gaps in a relationship to prevent
potential breakdown or conflict.
Troubleshooting: resolving conflicts, managing difficult relationships and improving
efficiency and quality of internal or external relationships.
Identifying recruitment needs: identifying key gaps of internal relational competence to
enable better targeted recruitment.
Public policy formulation: identifying areas of relationships in society and public
services that require specific intervention to enable the achievement of policy goals.
Tracking progress: enabling the evaluation of public policy and the assessment of
public services outcomes.
How the RHA has helped
We helped a successful engineering solutions consultancy identify significant
relational issues in top management, develop a more open and positive climate, and
avoid a potential fallout over the issue of leadership succession.

We helped a global company supplying services to a European manufacturer

sensitively uncover some difficult issues in its customer relationship and provided a
constructive way to move things forward for both sides. This led to considerable
improvement in the relationship.

Online access
The RHA is available online and is hosted by our principal partner, Team Focus. It can
be completed individually or as part of a paired process completed by two parties.
Average completion time is 20 minutes. A report and analysis will be generated and
delivered electronically to both audit administrators and respondents.

Accreditation
In conjunction with Team Focus, we also train consultants, trainers and other
professionals to become accredited practitioners of the RHA, equipping and enabling
them to carry out relational audits for individuals and organisations.

About us
We are a wholly-owned unit of the Relationships Foundation, the Cambridge-
based think tank for a better connected society and a United Kingdom registered
charity. The Foundation studies the effect that culture, business, policy and
government have on relationships, and campaigns on issues where relationships
are being undermined. The Foundation works with a wide range of leaders in
business, academia, public services and politics to implement relational ideas.

Contact us
Relationships Foundation Consulting & Leadership Development
3 Hooper Street
Cambridge CB1 2NZ
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)1223 566333
F: +44 (0)1223 566359
E: info@relationshipsfoundation.org
W: www.relationshipsfoundation.org

for a better connected society