dr Robert Nowak, MBA
Do You have people around You right now? Have You built a positive relationships with your employees, suppliers, partners? Or perhaps this crisis showed the true colors of those relationships? Be honest!
As human beings, we asses others in many different ways through the prism of our own experiences, vision of the world, biases, mental patterns, but also through our own internal value systems. And it’s a very complicated system, so it’s not easy to find one specific reason why we evaluate a person in one way or the other. It’s worth remembering that others also asses us in a certain way. In business, this translates into whether we want to work with someone or not, whether we will help someone in a difficult spot or not, whether we trust someone and defer payments for example or not.
I would like to propose to You a very basic algorithm for forming a Positive Business Relationship, which is worth keeping in mind while doing business with someone…anyone. It’s a very simple algorithm in theory and extremely difficult in practice. It has only 3 elements – Competence, Integrity and Care.
Competence relates to our fitness to perform tasks in our role, either in a general or in specific sense, but the point is to know what you are doing. Integrity is all about our consistency of our behaviors and decisions, and of course about keeping our word and fulfilling our promises. Care relates to whether we consider the interests and well-being of other people – if we think about our teams, business partners or are we just focused on our own benefits.
This algorithm is based on those mentioned elements and it’s a quotient and looks like this:
Business Relationship = C x I x C
Simple, right?
It’s worth looking at the implications of adopting such a pattern. If 0 appears in any of the values, then the business relationship will not be positive. Because please tell me – would You like to work with an specialist that integrally only wants what’s best for him/her? Or with an competent person who takes Your interests into account but its unpredictable in their decisions and behaviors? Or maybe with a person that has Your interest at heart with some consistency but does his/her job badly?
I think not!
Then ask Yourself now who are You in any given business relationship. And if find a 0 somewhere in this equation, think about how to change it, because as you can probably have seen now, your business success depends on those good relationships!
