Starter for 12

I once worked for a wonderfully cantankerous sales manager with 4 decades in the saddle. As with many old campaigners his advice was often packaged up in well-honed and pithy (and often stolen) one liners. One of these was...

'If you don't know what to do, do the right thing.'

This fizzed and popped in my mind for a couple of years until I had acquired a team of my own and I caught myself passing on the same advice.

Responsibility for the smooth running of relationships between 2 necessarily self-serving organizations can get complicated. All life is there, not least politics, personality and culture. It defies pure rational analysis. As the scale and the scope of the companies with which you are dealing grows so this complexity increases, often exponentially. So the ability to quickly decide on the 'right' course of action often has to rely on intuition. Companies don't like this. Table a policy based solely on the knowledge, judgement and experience of account managers and watch for the corporate immune response.

So organizations often try to set down policies for dealing with channels and alliances. I am often bumping into discussions about the 'rules of engagement'.* This is one of the alliance management paradoxes. There is a tug of war between trust and process. Companies don't like trusting the local talent and the local talent doesn't want to be tied up in process. But you need both. The answer lies somewhere between the two.

I decided that as a sales manager with a newly hired team I would try to be helpful in this regard. Long before anyone had heard of Jack Sparrow I came up with my Pirates of the Caribbean protocol: ' ... not so much rules as guidelines'. #

The intention was to avoid establishing rules. I offered my team 12 guiding principles against which we would judge our actions and decisions (ideally before they are carried out).





And here they are...


1. The establishment of trust – absolutely necessary and not to be assumed. All the other 11 principles are defined to deliver this. Explicit ways of demonstrating trust should be sought on both sides. Relationships can be viewed as a blend of trust and process.


2. Integrity – not to be assumed. A successful relationship will involve many individuals with differing objectives and pre-occupations. People, cultures and organisations have nuanced notions of integrity. Therefore this notion must be communicated clearly, consistently and often.


3. Consistency – in approach, planning and personalities. Nothing destroys trust better than inconsistent behaviour. Channel managers (especially alliance managers) should not be re-assigned too often. Their longer-term commitment is required. Frequent changes in alliance manager are both a symptom and a cause of an alliance that does not work.


4. Communication that is both open & discrete. Sharing information should be the default. Privileged and confidential information should be the strict exception. The level of open-ness in a relationship is a good guide to its overall state. I.e. if one makes a ‘good’ decision there will have no difficulty explaining it to all interested parties. Do not make decisions that you would rather not publicise. They tend to be suspect. This is the ‘touchstone of decision-making’.


5. A pre-occupation with the customer. No decisions should be made which creates a conflict between the interest of the relationship and that of the customer.


6. A spirit of enlightened self-interest. Look for ways to add value to your partners' business that may not directly benefit your organization.


7. Open & honest resolution of disagreements. Wherever possible disagreements should be anticipated. An advance declaration of actions with an explanation if necessary will prevent surprises and defuse possible disagreement.


8. Viewing conflict as an opportunity – embracing conflict as an opportunity to move a relationship forward & acknowledging conflict as an indicator of mutual commitment.

Often ‘heat’ and emotion when conflict occurs indicates that the relationship is important and valued. The participants care.





9. Empathy. Relationship participants should be constantly assessing situations from the point of view of their alliance partners.


10. Pragmatism and flexibility.


11. A shared view of objectives, environment, intentions and expectations.


12. Accepting the concept of unequal ‘balance of reciprocity’. This describes most relationships where individual activities rarely benefit both parties equally.


For many of my channel and alliance managers this stuff was common sense. But it legitimized it and gave us a framework and a vobabulary. I found it useful, they all said they did too. Hmmm... I thought, then asked, "what sort of sycophants are you?" They replied in unison, "what sort of sycophants would you like us to be?"


* Many business terms reflect the language of war. The expression 'rules of engagment' implies an adversarial relationship in the context of partnering and alliance management. At best this can set the wrong tone. At worst it betrays an attitude that can explain why some collaborations fail.

# If you have'nt seen the film you will be scratching your head, sorry.