The Facility Relationship Cycle is the process of communicating between facility managers and the company leaders. For facility managers, it can sometimes feel like your department lives on a different planet than the administrative/financial leaders within your organization. Many times, we discover that the distance between these two parties can be dissolved when both groups speak the same facilities language. This is the language of Strategic Stewardship.
The gaps in communication between the different players has most to do with where one falls within the Facility Relationship Cycle. The administrative/financial leaders sit at the top of the cycle and are most concerned with the business requirements of the facility, and typically are most involved with master planning and new building construction. Facility managers typically join the Facility Relationship Cycle at the operations and maintenance stage, and may have little to no involvement in the master planning phase and/or new construction of buildings. Therefore, from the onset, business leaders’ and facility managers’ relationship to and interest in the facility portfolio can be vastly different. They end up speaking nearly different languages as they try to accomplish their primary objectives. The ultimate objective is success of the organization, and facility managers must be able to communicate with the company leaders to accomplish that success.
The language of Strategic Stewardship is the common language that bridges the divide between facility managers and the administrative/financial leaders.
The below SlideShare gives you a deeper look into Strategic Stewardship and the Facility Relationship Cycle.
For more information, check out our article, “Financial Leaders vs Facilities Teams.”