Tag: Business

Business

How does trust impact openness and collaboration?

Friend or foe

I am naturally open and have a leaning towards trust as a default, until of course I’m bitten or receive some other signal that I’m being used.

I have been reading a lot of books and other content about this broader topic, but not as a central theme. The themes were much more about ideas and sharing and how magical things can happen. The topic of trust and its impact doesn’t seem to figure highly, but I do wonder whether this can limit collaboration if there’s an unsaid trust question somewhere in the “group”

Is the elephant in the room?


Can ideas truly flow unencumbered, if there are (unsaid) issues within a group, whereby the trust question is not addressed?

Will all group members really bring their collaboration and sharing “A” game I wonder?

Does it matter if some are open in spite of this?

Personally, I’d postulate that it’s not optimal if you’re not all equally invested and some are holding back.
So is the answer that all parties sign some kind of NDA? Does this work in practice, or is an NDA now so default in business discussions, that they’re all too easily signed and filed without real attention and commitment?

All these questions bubble to the surface often for me, as the topic has huge significance to the work that I undertake. So all of this relies on a high degree of trust.

Making progress (and quickly) is rather tricky without it

Business, Customer Focus, Leadership

How agile is your business?

What factors affect the agility of a business? Is it the simple case that if you are running a small business, then you are agile?
I don’t believe so, as there are other really critical factors that mean that a larger business can also be agile whereas a smaller business can also be slow and unresponsive.

For example, in order to be agile, a business needs to be able to make decisions rapidly and have an environment where staff are empowered. The culture needs to be one that focusses on the customer as their purpose, rather than the customer as an inconvenience and an interruption and a source of frustration. Believe me when I say that I have experienced senior business leaders speaking about their customers in very negative terms, and bemoaning their approach to suppliers.
Ownership of issues is also a factor that is critical in ensuring your business can be agile or not. Large or small, having simple processes that ensure that the business does not simply rely on people passing emails to each other and responding in a timely fashion, is critical. A customer with a requirement is only interested in a partnership with another organisation able to understand them and an ability to execute.
So in summary the following are necessary to enable your business to operate with agility:

> Customer focus
> Empowerment
> Decision making
> Process – simple and effective.
> Ownership

And an agile business, like a successful sports team, needs a high degree of collaboration and teamwork focus.