Serving the Partners Who Support Your Company
How can you best serve your partners? Healthy partners and partnerships support a sustainably successful business. This is the fourth in a series on Service to All Stakeholders.
Most businesses need to form partnerships with other businesses in order to succeed. They may be vendors who provide raw materials, manufacturing or office supplies. They also may be resellers, marketers, or software providers. Some are companies you interact with once or twice, while others may be firms that your company relies on everyday.
All partners deserve to be treated in the same way you care for your company and its people. The ones that you work with closely are especially important. Yet many businesses see this as an adversarial relationship, one in which there is a winner and a loser, and your job is to make your company come out on top. But if you win, then the other company, your partner, will suffer. They won't be as strong. And why should they continue to work with you or not try to find ways of decreasing their service to you?
It is much better for both companies to succeed, to be healthy and thriving. Best is for both to be treated fairly, in pricing, payments, and all other forms of contact. Your business relies on theirs for something, so you are best off if they are also best off. It is similar to the concept of paying workers as much as possible and otherwise treating them as well as you can. A partner is similar, but is a brother or sister company rather than an individual.
That also means you should be responsible for knowing that company’s true values and work practices. It’s on you if you buy from a company that has poor working conditions or underpays their workers. It’s on you if they use harmful ingredients or materials in their products or processes. Patagonia does an exemplary job in this regard, carefully learning about and then publicly reporting on all aspects of their partners for raw materials and manufacturing in their quest to heal the planet and support safe and healthy working conditions.
Taking responsibility for your partners’ actions and health is difficult. It requires a great deal of extra work. It’s much easier to not look for problems or practices that you would never condone in your company, especially if they are occurring in a far off land. But you are responsible for what happens there, both day-to-day and over the long term. You are participating in the oppression of people who are subject to poor or unsafe working conditions or the harm to the planet if they are dumping toxic waste. If you are reading this article, you don’t want to be at a company whose partners do that. If you are conscious about your company’s actions, how can you be unconscious in this regard?
Evolutionary Business isn’t easy and expectations aren’t that your partners will be perfect, but if you orient in this way and take the time and make the effort to learn more about your partners’ practices, you can choose partners whom you are proud of and perhaps you can learn from. You can work in solidarity with them for the betterment of all, each doing what you do best as you build a global chain that raises up all people and the planet.
Next, we will look at how a company that strives to be maximal service to all of its stakeholders can be of service to investors and other shareholders.
