Since our newsletters a few people have commented that they found trust an unusual thing to write about, in terms of business. For them, who are not naive, its hard to go after trust directly. You can ask “are you trustworthy?” but the answer is always yes, and therefore meaningless. Defeated by this difficulty, it fades into the background.
Maybe what is needed are some practical steps for implementing trust. How do you convert a feeling, a personal judgment, into practical business steps.
The following is a summary of the ongoing discussion.
As an example to work through, let’s say that you buy a project (of any description) for $100,000, to be delivered in 6 months. How would you manage the delivery of your supplier to you? Would you:
The answer to this question is… another question…. “what are the consequences of non-delivery?”
Let’s say the answer is ‘disaster’.
You might ask, “but how were we to know?” They looked reputable etc etc.
Unfortunately this answer means you are accepting a third party reference on your supplier, you are accepting other peoples’ opinions on projects that may or may not be similar to this one.
The challenge here is to build up your own experience of the supplier on this project. Your aim is to test the supplier to deliver on small commitments regularly.
The first two steps here are ‘past tense’ - little trust required because the steps are small and regular, and not too much can go wrong before you come across it, and fix it if needed.
Its the third step where trust begins, when you start predicting. The good news here is that you are now using your own experience to make this prediction, which gives you more confidence.
If they fail these small tests, then you monitor closely. If they do everything well, then you can relax the monitoring.
What are these ’small tests’?
We monitor their communication (oral, written, and is it complete?), their attendance at meetings (do they always show up, or postpone, and why?), timeliness, negotiation style (passive/ aggressive/ assertive), optimism/pessimism, urgency, and so on.
Any one of these may be no cause for alarm, but a combination could and should make you curious.
A big example is how well business partners communicate - if they are open, transparent, always accurate. For example, the current financial crisis (Oct 2008) has occurred because companies have hidden the weaknesses in their investment strategies. (There is no legal obligation to be so detailed). They have not been as open as they could be (they knew, but didn’t say), so now we have a massive confidence crisis, because we don’t know what else they are not telling us.
No-one can predict, because the information has been unreliable, and it will be a long time before we regard them as consistent. So recovery will be slow.
So, back to our 6 month/$100,000 project…
You’re objections to this approach of interacting closely may be:
Another perspective is to actively build the relationship.
I hope this helps…
