The foundation of every sucessful Business collaboration is trust. Here's an attempt to give some practical ideas on how to enhance trust in a professional Alliance.
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What is an Alliance?
Wikipedia:
An alliance is a pact, coalition or friendship between
two or more parties, made in order to advance
common goals and to secure common interests.
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Trust in an Alliance
Trust
=
essential ingredient in successful alliances
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Best Practices
Model the behaviors you expect
Define the Rules of Engagement
Establish Significance and Position
Identify measures of trust
Strategic and not just need based
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Best practices – Modelling behavior
4 drives of behavior
Drive to Acquire -> Secure & Control
Drive to Bond -> Relationships
Drive to Create -> Learn & Invent
Drive to Defend -> Protect & Attack
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Best practices – Modelling behavior
In honor of another’s
drive to Acquire:
Enhance the other’s capacity to acquire
necessary resources
In honor of another’s
drive to Bond:
Keep promises rather than breaking them
Seek fair exchanges rather than cheating
In honor of another’s
drive to Create:
Tell truths rather than falsehoods
Share useful information
Respect other’s beliefs
In honor of another’s
drive to Defend:
Help protect the other & their teammates
Detect and punish cheaters
Source: “The Architecture or Trust” by Lynch & Lawrence
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Best practices – Rules of Engagement
Define how to engage
Plan jointly
Provide visibility to make effective business decisions
Communicate openly, often and clearly
Anticipate, confront and resolve conflicts quickly
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Best practices – Measures of trust
“Here is my secret. It is very simple: it is only with
the heart that one can see rightly; what is
essential is invisible to the eyes”.
So said Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Little Prince, and he was right.
Does each part provide the value?
Do we respect the rules of engagements?
Are we open, honest and deliver on promises?
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Best practices – Strategic?
”You have something I need”
vs
”A pie expanding mindset”
One One Three
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Building a System of Trust in an Alliance
Carsten Watolla Alliance Partners Business Development Manager
Q&A
Notes de l'éditeur
Building a System of Trust in an Alliance.
It’s about some practical aspects and not about the theory of trust
This presentation is as important for our staff as it is for our Alliance Partners.
If you would have to invest 1000€ out of your pocket when I tell you that I solve this Rubik's cube in less than 90 sec, would you do so?
The message is: building trust requires time!
In some Alliances you will find an immediate connection and get a jump start to focus on developing business jointly.
But, generally speaking: Trust is not just there. Mutual trust needs to be developed over time.
Both parts have to work on gaining trust just like in a personal relationship.
Message: it’s about advancing common goals and not just advancing one parts goals
Trust is the basis for successful alliances
Mutual trust is a shared belief that you can depend on each other to achieve common goals
In a strategic alliance mutual trust also means that you can depend on each other to adapt as necessary.
Why should we invest time in developing trust in our alliance partnership?
Because it gives confidence that actions taken will serve both parties' interests.
It increases the likelihood of gaining strategic alignment.
You will be able to predict what your partner will do in different situations
You will create new solutions (mutual creativity) by sharing the know-how and different point of view (Synergy)
The result will be better business results for all parties
If we don’t invest time in building trust, it will create fairly fast friction in the alliance:
For example you don’t share customer and opportunity information timely why you could end up in a competitive situations.
Instead of together solving challenges with customers we might start blaming each other.
At the end both you and NI looses business.
Let’s have a look at a few best practices
Behave as you want the other part to behave
We all know that our children don’t do what we say but they do what we do.
In an Alliance somebody has to make the first step and behave as you want the other part to behave.
How often have I heard that, they don’t share information with us so why would I share information with them?
Generally speaking, everybody has 4 drives of behavior.
Drive to Acquire -> Secure resources & Control
Drive to Bond -> Relationships, engage in teams
Drive to Create -> Learn & Invent
Drive to Defend -> Protect & Attack
We want to make sure that the create and bond drives are stronger than the acquire and defend drives
In order to suppress Acquire and defend drives and increase the create and bond drive of the other part we can do a few things
Acquire: we can add sales resources or engineering resources to the other’s team
Bond:
Promises: execute on agreed actions, get back in time
Fair: in the past we had sellers who wanted to maximize short term revenue win why they would try to sell NI HW directly to end-customer
Create:
Truth: shouldn’t need an example
Useful information: we share information which is not relevant or not specific enough.
Respect others beliefs: everybody has a certain way in doing things. We tend to belief our way is the right way. You can try the other’s way of doing things.
Defend: It’s about protecting the individuals interest
Next up is Rules of Engagement:
How to engage: how do you want to do business together, how frequently to meet and what to discuss? Who are the point of contacts?
Plan jointly: define what parts’ of the business you want to plan and execute on together where each part can add value to
Visibility: share timely specific information which is relevant for the joint business plan
Communication: self explanatory
Conflicts: if we don’t handle conflicts, we start finger pointing, assumptions are being made and rumors start floating around.
It’s important that rules of engagement live within the alliance and are not just somewhere on written on paper.
A simple discussion where you agree on some basic ground rules can be enough.
How significant is the Alliance to each others business?
Have we identified enough value in our Alliance?
Have we articulated what we value?
Is the value significant enough to each others business?
We tend to assume that the other part values everything we bring to the Alliance but we forget to check if all add values are relevant.
If we don’t identify enough value and articulate it it will result in disengagement or we are simply not aligned with the values and the Alliance Partnership is questionable
Thus, the more value we identify and acknowledge the stronger will the Alliance Partnership become
One of my favored books since I was teenager is “Little Prince”. He tells his secret about measuring trust:
While I believe he’s right we still need to identify some ways in measuring trust.
We just talked about value, we can look back and check on the promised values.
Looking at the rules of engagement we can easily look at e.g. did we provide the agreed training, did we meet that frequently as discussed?
And lastly, are we open and honest.
The last one is about the Strategic thinking in the alliance
If we just think need based, for example when we expand into new application areas like Condition Monitoring. If we just think about what we need but not about what the other part needs. Those alliances are bound to fail.
Thinking both ways is a step in the right direction.
Best is to have a pie expanding mindset. The more we understand the other parts needs the better we are able to align our strategies and build a stronger alliance. By creating new unique value together one + one becomes three.
We have to invest time in building a trusted business Alliance to advance common goals.
While investing time ideally there should be some successes on the path to achieving a full developed trusted Alliance Partnership.
We are investing in Alliance Partner Managers around the globe.
Today, we have a few more AP Managers including our VP, Victor Mieres, here today.
If you feel you don’t gain the trust you need in order to do business jointly with NI, contact any of us Partner Managers.
We can help bridging trust to other NI staff you don’t meet regular, or we can help resolving conflicts with your local NI sales colleagues.
Before I open up for questions, feedback and ideas one last comment:
We are all nice, sympathetic people and most are strong communicators.
But communication by itself is not enough. Only in combination with trust we will do business together!
With that I want to open up for questions, feedback and maybe you sharing some ideas.
Carsten Watolla
Alliance Partners Business Development Manager
Carsten.watolla@ni.com
+46709279514