The Importance of Trust
Research for a project to evaluate effectiveness in partnerships
“Partnerships have many facets — they’re complex but not difficult. They’re a relationship built on trust and mutual benefit — two simple principles.”
This quote from PartnerHacker caught my eye. The same day, I worked on a partner research project and read through the latest Edelman Trust Barometer. And for me, it all came together. Not a coincidence, of course, as I am very focused on the topic of partnerships at the moment.
It’s the way this quote simplifies many of the questions that organisations have around partnership. Many people, including myself, can get easily overwhelmed when working on a new partner project and trying to make it work.
One thing I have learned from projects over the years: you cannot force someone into a successful partnership. Both parties have to have an interest and work on it — constantly — to make sure that the two pillars of trust and mutual benefit remain stable.
This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer highlighted the cycle of distrust. The survey has run for more than two decades and uses a methodology of online surveys across 28 countries with approximately 33,000 responders. The survey studies the level of trust held by citizens for the institutions of government, media, NGOs and businesses.
In 2022 at 61%, business is the most trusted institution, ahead of NGOs at 59%, government at 52% and media at only 50%. And nearly 6 in 10 say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see evidence it is trustworthy.
Norma Watenpaugh, CEO of Phoenix Consulting Group, gave a great example in her interview with Jared Fuller and Justin Bartels from the PartnerUP podcast. Norma, who works with large companies (like Google Cloud) to help scale their ecosystems, said the following:
“Consulting Partners (in the Cloud ecosystem) would always appreciate sales assistance and sales leads, of course. However, the most important thing for them is to be seen as trusted partners, to feel comfortable leading with you.”
Norma goes into more detail and, of course, there is much more to this, because not every organisation or project is the same and every person has different levels of comfort depending on the topic. Yet many projects tend to underestimate the importance of trust in a partnership.
It’s complex, not difficult.
How would you approach building trust in a new business partner?
I am sharing this article as part of a research project with Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl about effective partnership, which I have also outlined here.
If you have a story or example of a failed or successful partner or alliance project that you have been involved in, we would love to hear from you. Every example and story will help build our research and data.
More about the project will be shared and documented via Medium and Linkedin.
