Win win relationships

Ideal relationships in a business sense are relationships which all sides are satisfied. All sides being satisfied can equate to all sides winning. How does this work?

Win win relationships

In order to understand how to help a person win you have to know what a person's goals are, what their interests are, what they really want. In business it's all about supply and demand, and you can only know what to supply if you know the demand. In a business deal it is important to know the motivations of each of your business partners and what they seek to obtain from the relationship. This also translates into personal relationships because if you don't know what a person wants from you personally, whether it be love, friendship, information/knowledge, you cannot truly say you understand and know them as they are.

Win win relationships are possible when all sides know each other well enough to know each others' motivations. This requires that motivations be at least somewhat transparent. In business where the goal is for all shareholders to make money then it's quite easy to function under that understanding and motivation. Of course it's more complicated than this because people who want to make money want to make money for some reason other than just to have money, and understanding the true motivations of what your business partners want the money is even of greater importance.

Examples:

• Alice has a gambling debt and she is really desperate to make money to pay off her debt. She's willing to take additional risks that other business partners aren't willing to take in order to get out of this debt.
• Bob is a family man who wants to save and put his kids through college. He also has a wife who is high maintenance and likes shopping. Bob is wiling to take risks but not nearly as much risk as Alice because he has a family to be concerned about.
• Jane lives a comfortable life, has plenty of money, has a big family, and does not have expensive tastes. She is not motivated to chase money because she's more concerned about maintaining relationships and finding the love of her life.

These three examples are all different. The person in the deepest debt is the person who has the most need to make money quickly to pay off the debt. The person with the family with responsibilities may be most concerned about losing their family in a divorce or about their kids not being able to have the chance to go to college, and perhaps they are trying to maintain their middle class position. Jane isn't interested in money because she doesn't need or want that, but is interested in finding the love of her life.

As you can see people are all different, motivated not necessarily by the same things, and it's in some cases mere twist of fate which determines what different people want or are looking for at particular times in their lives. For this reason, in business a shareholder who has a family might be much more concerned about decisions the company makes which can influence their family, such as if the company is making a product which isn't "family friendly" then they might want to alter the product even at the cost of some profit. The person who is motivated to get money quickly to pay off a debt might overlook a lot of the family friendly concerns instead to focus on bringing as much profit to shareholders in the form of dividends. And the person who simply is concerned with finding a partner might have concerns about how being a shareholder can effect their reputation, their personal life, etc.

These are all fictional examples and may not be truly accurate but it goes to show that stakeholder analysis is an important skill. Only by knowing what each stakeholder is truly motivated by can you know why different stakeholders feel different ways. In a business where there are partners it may also be the case that everyone starts out with similar motivations and then over time divide apart, as we sometimes see in music bands where in the beginning everything is swell but a few years in the band breaks up because they don't agree on the direction.

Creating and maintaining win win relationships are not easy but in order to have long term relationships under social exchange theory then each member of the relationship must feel that they have more to gain than to lose from the relationship. If it's business then each business partner must think ultimately that they have more to gain than to lose from the partnership. Know your customer, know your business partners, know your friends.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_exchange_theory
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis