Your stakeholders are the lifeblood of your organization. Lose customers, associates, etc. and your organization dries up and disappears. Fulfill the critical needs of your key stakeholders better than competition and you will have all the business you want.
Most organizations have transactional relationships with their stakeholders. A stakeholder provides you with a resource and your company pays per contracted agreement. True partnerships go well beyond a contractual transaction. Partners help each other because they rely on each other for their success. Partners go beyond basic transactions because this is what ensures each other’s survival. We recommend a process that we call “Partnership Commitments” to break away from the transactional norm. Partnership Commitments have four elements:
- Desired Results: what should be the results of our working together?
- Expectations: how will we work together? Who will do what? What are the do’s and don’ts in our partnership?
- Resources: what financial, material, or human resources are needed for the partnership to succeed? Who will contribute each of these resources?
- Monitoring: what is our action plan? How will we measure our progress? When will we come together to monitor our progress?
Moving to such a partnership relationship can call for some serious cultural transformations on both parties. But, it can be done. We have seen clients bring millions of dollars to the bottom line once they made such Partnership Commitments!