Are You in a Business Relationship or a Partnership?

At VerticalChange, we value collaboration and partnerships. We believe that social services agencies can serve their communities best when they are able to develop important, long-term partnerships with other agencies and stakeholders. We are proud of our ability to offer a software solution that facilitates the activities of valuable partnerships.

As a researcher working in R&D at VerticalChange, I enjoy seeing our business relationships transform into partnerships. The work becomes so much more meaningful as partners begin to collaborate to solve a key problem and embark on a shared destiny. The work and the possibilities are exciting.

Key Ingredients: Trust, Mutual Understanding, Significant and Balanced Contribution, Sacrifice

Business Relationship vs. Partnership

To build a good partnership with effective collaboration, you must appreciate the difference between a business relationship and a partnership. Business relationships involve one participant seeking another to respond to and fill an immediate need. Partnerships, on the other hand, involve long-term commitments where each participant contributes to the success of the other. Business relationships can be moved from a zero-sum game to one where both entities strive for mutually beneficial long-term success.

Building Trust

What is probably obvious to many is the need for trust before moving from a business relationship to a partnership. Trust between the partners is important for the same reason it is important in your own personal relationships. You want a partnership where the two parties bring out the best in each other, share resources to meet individual and mutual needs, provide emotional support (and sometimes a little validation), and are free to share their ideas and differing perspectives. The comfort sensed in a partnership comes from having established trust. With comfort and trust, partners can feel free to give their all, make mistakes, and take risks. Like your personal relationship, a partnership has to allow for expression of vulnerability and trust that each partner has the other’s well-being in mind.

Mutual Understanding

This is quite difficult although it may appear simple on its face. Good partnerships require that each partner has the ability to move beyond their own perspective and understand how their partner perceives the world. This requires a commitment of effort and time that is sometimes not possible within on organization, be it due to lack of resources or poor leadership. The effort required is getting to a true understanding of your biases and recognizing that you spend the majority of your working day inside your company. This makes it difficult to see things from anyone else’s perspective.

Equal Input, Equal Output

Whether you are talking about equity theory in the workplace, balancing energy input with energy output in homeostasis, or healthy balance in relationships, significant contribution of something attractive enough for the other party to want to be in the partnership is key. Value of an activity or contribution is assigned by the recipient as they assess how they stand to benefit from the arrangement. Each partner engages in ongoing comparison and assessment of the input/outcome ratio. Here is where trust comes in handy — should a sense of negative or positive inequity occur, each partner must be able to address the issue and adjust.

Sacrifice

A little sacrifice goes a long way. Partners have to be able to act in ways that may serve the other’s interest first and bend the rules at times to help out. This focuses on the long-term which means a willingness to experience short-term pain. Know beforehand what you are willing to sacrifice to prove commitment to a long-term partnership.

Visit our website to learn more about how we can partner with you and use tech for social good. You help people… Our software helps you.

Josh Matacotta, Psy.D., CAHIMS

Written by

Research Scientist

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