Over the last few years, I have been working with organisations to help them to develop their relationships with suppliers and other strategic partners. Part of this involved us researching the characteristics of highly successful (and the not so successful) alliances and partnerships. We noticed three key themes which were symptomatic of excellent relationships. What was interesting is that these themes easily translate into individual relationships too, and it’s therefore worth taking a look for anyone who wants to build stronger relationships of any kind.
The great news is that they are pretty easy to understand and also to take action on – you don’t need to go into mediation to make big strides on these themes!
- Trust and Credibility: The confidence that you can rely on each other to match delivery with expectations at both a personal and a professional level.
- Communication and Influence: The confidence that everyone is able to clearly state their views, opinions and ideas with an equal opportunity to influence the other.
- Problem Solving and Conflict Resolution: The willingness and ability to face the difficult issues and work to move things forward in a proactive and constructive manner.
As part of our client solution, we built an online questionnaire to measure each of these themes with a series of indicators for people to rate. Some people chose to get people within their organisation to rate the relations, while others decided to include their supplier in the exercise .
But you don’t need a survey to consider these three themes in more detail. Just get your team together, put the titles up on a flipchart and start pooling your experience and intelligence to find a way to stronger relationships!