Key Facets of a Successful Business Relationship

One of the outcomes of a recent seminar we held on the subject of “how to create successful business relationships”, we looked at the responses people gave when analysing relationships that the participants had that were particularly effective.

The interesting thing is that the answers held good for both business and personal relationships (some participants were working on business relationships while others focused on personal ones because they had not yet set up in business).

Whilst the key facets may be strikingly obvious and certainly are not intended to be an exhaustive list, it is amazing how easily we can forget these important aspects and blame others for them not being present. If we take the initiative and instigate whatever it takes to bring some of these key aspects to our business relationships, sometimes being prepared to walk away where the other party does not wish to operate on that basis, truly outstanding business relationships can follow.

The key facets that came up during the recent seminar are:

1. Being straight with each other.
2. Being open with each other.
3. Really listening to each other’s needs and desires and being prepared to accommodate them.

The interesting thing was that relationship did not work, they were somewhat mirroring of these and key assets of relationships that were not effective were:

1. Lack of trust.
2. Lack of common interest.
3. Lack of mutual respect.
4. Lack of communication.
5. Inconsistent values.

The interesting thing for us was that participants in the seminar were able to stand back from their business relationships, see what wasn’t working and then see that even when someone was behaving badly, there was something they could accept responsibility for that would allow them to move on. One woman said that one of her customers only paid her when she went to visit him, otherwise he delayed payment. She realised however that she had never told him that this is unacceptable to her and indeed all she did was moan about him. Talking straight removes much of the strain and pressure caused by ineffective relationships.

Our work in this area has completely shifted how we practice. We stand back from all our work and ask ourselves what we can be responsible for in helping our clients create relationships that work. This allows us to highlight imbalance in commercial contracts and terms that are clearly designed almost to create problems and even to question the overall structure and appropriateness of the deal or the way it is being handled.

So, the seemingly simple statement of being “committed to creating relationships that work” is entirely altering our experience of practice and the end product for our clients, whether the products involves dispute resolution or a commercial deal - as time goes on we will include further articles on this subject and case studies on our website to enable other people to learn from this.