The Importance of Strong Partnerships BY: Meg Whitman

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Relationships with customers and employees are at the core of any successful business. But in today’s evolving landscape, strategic alliances, joint ventures and creative collaborations can be just as critical to success. At HP, we’re especially focused on the relationship with our channel partners – the distributors and resellers who bring our products and services to the marketplace every day.

In many cases, these partners are the face of HP, the team on the front lines helping us serve our customers. Many have been with us for decades, and today they contribute up to 70 percent of HP’s revenue. For those reasons, maintaining and developing strong partner relationships is one of HP’s top priorities.

Global Partner Conference

This week, we are bringing together more than 2,000 of HP’s partners from around the world for our annual Global Partner Conference (GPC) in Las Vegas. The event provides our partners with the opportunity to share their goals for the year ahead, preview new products and solutions, and align on our respective strategies.

Keeping these relationships strong and mutually beneficial is absolutely critical to our ecosystem and success. Look around your organization’s ecosystem. Beyond your customers and employees, who are your essential partners? Whether it’s your sales channel or collaborations with other organizations, the following principles are key to maintaining healthy business partnerships.

1. Start with Stability

Stability forms the foundation of any successful partnership. At HP, years of uncertainty – from inconsistent strategy to a revolving door of leadership – were beginning to wear down our partners. As a result, we made restoring stability the first step toward rebuilding our relationships. This included articulating a clear strategy and taking immediate actions to stabilize the business. We repaired our balance sheet, reduced operating company net debt to zero, and put in place a solid leadership team that understood the value of our partners.

2. Play Away Games

When it comes to building strong relationships, there’s no substitute for meeting people on their home turf. Over the past year, I’ve met with more than 1,000 customers and partners and the bulk of these meetings have been outside the walls of HP. Traveling can be time-consuming and expensive, but it can also be a strong signal of your commitment to a relationship.

3. Listen and Translate Words into Action

Establishing two-way communications is just one part of strengthening relationships. Words are great, but action is what matters. When I meet with partners, I always try to make our conversations about what we can be doing better for them, not the other way around, and then act quickly to address their needs.

4. Make It Profitable

When I first joined HP, I kept hearing from partners that our organization was too complex. Outdated tools, hard-to-navigate processes, and too many programs were making it challenging to work with HP.

To fix these problems, we rolled out new tools and removed bureaucracy to make it easier and faster to close deals. We cut in half the number of technical certifications and created role-based certifications that require significantly less time out of office. We removed gates and caps, enabling partners to begin earning rebates from their first sale and giving them access to unlimited earning potential. Meaningful incentives and a streamlined compensation structure are not only driving our business forward, they are making doing business with HP more rewarding.

Building strong relationships with our partners based on mutual respect and profitability doesn’t just benefit HP and our partners. It also puts us in a better position to help our customers win.

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Key Truths For Being An Outstanding Manager

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While there are numerous books, courses, and online trainings for improving your managerial skills, seldom do they address the psychological underbelly of wise and wonderful management. That’s understandable since they aren’t created by people with a psychological background. 

But over the past many years we’ve seen how understanding and incorporating the following psychological truths have enabled good managers to become great: 

1 - Everyone Knows How To Follow 
Everyone was once a small child whose very existence depended on following their parents or other caretakers. So the act of following is built into each and every one of us. And while some chronological adults rebel against managerial leadership in an unconscious carryover from their youth, the vast majority of people welcome clear, supportive leadership they can readily follow. 

2 - Your Followers Want You To Exhibit Strong Leadership 
When a manager can be counted on to provide clear directions, clear expectations, clear rewards and clear critique in response to outcomes, s/he can provide a confident-making platform for everyone on the team. Being nice, wishy washy, or distracted by the company’s internal politics raises grave concerns for the future of the team’s project as well as anxiety about management’s missing guidance about current expectations.

3 - Your Team Wants You To Lead Not Rely On Their Opinion
While team input and collaboration are extremely important and invaluable, all too often managers abdicate their leadership role in favor of “consulting” with people on the team to try to handle dicey hiring problems, team restructuring, or other insecurities that are not the business of that manager’s team members. 

4 - Forget About Being A Buddy 
Some managers, uncomfortable with their senior status and leadership role, believe that becoming friends and buddies with their team members will empower those who report to them. Actually, nothing is further from the truth. Role confusion makes for team members’ job confusion which creates organizational confusion. 

5 - Trying Too Hard To Save An Employee Endangers Your Whole Team 
Well meaning managers can often get caught up in trying to rescue a team member whose behavior and/or output is insufficient, incorrect, or injurious to the well being of the team. They may have recruited and/or hired this individual. They may have had great hopes for this person’s career and it’s now a blow to their sense of competence to have to concede that the person needs to be let go. But letting go must become a must-do in order to protect the well being of the other team members and the team’s output. 

6 - Big Visions Do Not Make For Wise Guidance 
Your team needs wise and caring guidance for execution of your project vision, whatever it is. Merely providing a big vision leaves everyone scrambling to guess at what is expected, demoralizing and rendering insecure what might otherwise be an excellent team. Remember, everyone knows how to follow. Give them clear, empowering guidelines and most people will knock themselves out to produce what you want from them. 

While there are certainly many other psychological truths about excellent management, these six will get you started thinking about what’s most wanted and expected of you from your followers—who by and large want to please and impress you.

What other psychologically-oriented qualities do you think are essential?

(Photo: Business meetings eventspaceportland/Flickr)

Judith Sherven, PhD and her husband Jim Sniechowski, PhD http://JudithandJim.com have developed a penetrating perspective on people’s resistance to success, which they call The Fear of Being Fabuloustm. Recognizing the power of unconscious programming to always outweigh conscious desires, they assert that no one is ever failing—they are always succeeding. The question is, at what? To learn about how this played out in the life of Whitney Houston for example, and how it may be playing out in your own life, check out their 6th book: http://WhatReally KilledWhitneyHouston.com 

Currently consultants on retainer to LinkedIn providing executive coaching, leadership training and consulting as well as working with private clients around the world, they continually prove that when unconscious beliefs are brought to the surface, the barriers to greater success and leadership presence begin to fade away. You can learn about their core program “Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous” by going to http://OvercomingtheFearofBeingFabulous.com 

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Why We All Need Visionary Leaders

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I have always felt as leaders with global experiences and exceptional connections we have a responsibility to share our journey and energy to inspire future generations.

In recent years, I’ve focused my time and energy on sharing Burberry’s brand, culture and digital transformational lessons. Speaking to different sectors - from banking to insurance to educational institutions - I hope in some small way to have shed light on ideas that could greatly impact the companies and communities they serve.

Just under a year ago, I had coffee with someone I greatly admire - the visionary digital educator Sal Khan who is single handedly disrupting a sector desperate for revolution. Very few leaders have what author Jim Collins calls ‘big hairy audacious goals’ but with their simple mission to make education accessible to everyone, Sal and Khan Academy could change the world.

Not dissimilar to Bill and Melinda Gates who want to eradicate disease, Scott Harrison ofcharity: water who wants to provide everyone with clean drinking water or Mark Zuckerbergwho dreams of connecting the world, it is so rare to find a great leader with a gigantic global vision and such passion and clarity as to how to resolve it.

Hopefully, this is not the first time you're hearing about Sal or Khan Academy. Perhaps you’ve seen his TED talk, visited Khan Academy or read about it in various business publications. In short, Khan Academy is a not-for profit with the goal of providing free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Through leveraging digital and great video content, they’ve created one of the most innovative companies in the world that will transform one of the most underinvested and fundamentally valuable foundation to our future generations’ growth and development.

I had the honour of speaking with Sal and his incredible team in San Francisco last spring, sharing lessons on brand, leadership and how to nurture a culture of creativity and innovation. I left that day with even greater respect for the clarity and intensity of their vision and the passion with which they execute it.

At Burberry, we have always said that our greater purpose is to create not just a great brand, but a great company. Through the Burberry Foundation, global teams unite to share key learnings with young people in communities where associates live and work to inspire, unlock and nurture their creative confidence. As the company prepares for tomorrow’s changes and challenges, one key measure of its success will be how many lives around the world are touched and transformed by the power of its performance. It is humbling to think our story could inspire the Khan Academy team to continue to do what they already do so brilliantly.

Education is a global issue for all of us. We need all companies to get behind Khan Academy and contribute to making sure every person on this planet has the opportunity of education.

Congratulations to Sal and the Khan Academy team!!!!!!

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