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It is essential to ensure each of your business
relationships is an investment and not just a cost. The
bottom line in each business relationship must add a measurable
value to your business - preferably in the short to medium term,
but certainly in the longer term.
The trust factor can protect you and your
business interests, but to do this, you need to check your trust
style. Do you assume trustworthiness when you first engage
with a person? Or do you watch for evidence of
trustworthiness before deciding whether and how to engage with that
person?
1. Strategic Business Relationship
Most businesses will have relationships with a
number of external organisations, groups and individuals.
These may provide access to information, advice, trends, learning
and development, or social or formal networking with like-minded
people. The challenge for any business is to ensure that each
business relationship is an investment - which means it either
creates or adds measurable value to the business.
There is an art and science to ensuring each of
your business relationships is an investment and not just a
cost.
The art is the doing of a thing. You may
have a need, challenge or opportunity, and decide to look for
individuals or groups who may be able to assist or be useful.
The next step is to find out as much as you can before committing
yourself and accessing their information, advice, data-base,
workshops - or paying your subscription and entering in to a formal
relationship.
You may decide that a business opportunity is in
sight, but that you wish to consider becoming part of a consortium
or alliance - or even considering a partnership.
Science is the understanding of a thing. It is
necessary to understand and appreciate the practical implications
of what you do, why you should do one thing and not another, how
you assess risk and how you will manage any ensuing
committment. If you understand your business relationship
activity, you will be able to monitor and measure progress, value
and cost.
Strategic business relationships by their very
definition are relationships that will contribute to the viability,
credibility or durability of your business. You need to
strategically design this aspect of your business to ensure minimal
cost and maximum benefit or value. You will need to invest
some of your scarce resources - which could be membership dues,
registration fees, travel costs - or more importantly opportunity
cost. If you are convinced that time spent in each business
relationship is an investment, then assess and then measure the
investment as compared with the cost.
2. The Trust Factor.
Trusting is a different challenge - and
you will also need to work on this continuously.
The ideal starting point in a potential business
relationship is to adopt a neutral attitude and expectation of
others, and to administer trust by seeing if others earn or deserve
our trust or if they should not be entitled to or worthy of our
trust.
If a business relationship earns your trust, the
next step is respect, then willingness to collaborate and finally
investment of time, energy or even money: the ideal business
relationship is one of mutual trust and respect where both parties
work at retaining that trust.
On the other hand, if a business relationship
does not earn your trust - or deteriorates at any stage along the
path towards investment, you should heed any warning sign which may
turn into a sense of alarm: a relationship rarely survives the
alarm stage - if it does, it has a high possibility of becoming
dysfunctional or completely breaking down.
You can, however find yourself remaining in a
dysfunctional working relationship if you either fail to recognise
that this has happened, or have put yourself into a situation from
which it is difficult or perhaps impossible to retreat or
escape.
Be aware that as a business person, we can be
charmed, tricked or cajoled into trusting another person or group
of people so that you subconsciously give them your trust rather
than waiting for them to earn or deserve it. This can result
in your committing to an arrangement without checking whether the
other party is worhty of such committment. On the other hand
you can hear something about a person before meeting them that may
set off a warning or even raise an alarm within you: then, when you
do meet them, you withold trust unneccessarily thus negating any
chance of an effective relationship.
Probably the hardest thing for a business person
is managing trust. And I need to emphasise that the key word
in the previous sentence is 'managing' - it is your responsibilty
to manage trust, not the responsibilty of others. If someone
lets us down or takes advantage of you, you need to look for the
moment that you allowed this to happen. If you genuinely look
for it, you are sure to find it. And there is your lesson
upon which to build better trust managment. |
