Leadership team roles in development of stakeholder relationships
This month’s leadership lens is here to focus on why its important to develop robust working together relationships between your organisation and its collaborators and competition, and what you seek to gain from working in allyship with competitors.
The problem
Let’s be honest, sometimes it can be difficult to see how to work with organisations that are seeking to serve either the same customers to you or are have been prone to copying you in the past. It’s quite a normal feeling to feel like putting up the defences against releasing your intellectual property to competitors, but when is it a good thing to share insight with your competitors?
Defining a competitor
Competitors come into four categories:
1. Affiliates- those who there is seemingly enough market difference for your services to enable both of your services to be relevant to the same customers without compromising either offer- enabling you both to pitch to the same customers.
2. Co-opetition- If you are unlikely to win a piece of business, contract or grant etc, without being seen to be cooperating in a wider environ, strategic coopetition may often strengthen your business offer. The key here is to ensure each organisation plays to its strengths, and overlapping strengths are split up in terms of revenue split early on and way before the deal is complete. Co-opetition is much better than losing a contract, so if you can see a competitor getting an edge over you, unless you can reasonably catch up and overtake, you will want to look to move into coopetition, but you are switching this cooperation for shared profits from a contract. It is ultimately better then losing a contract though.
3. Competition- other organisations mimicking your ways of working, trying to gain intellectual or strategy insight through existing staff, and those with aggressive tactics, for example excluding you from the table at key discussions, undermining behaviours, copycatting.
4. Partners- partners are deeply aligned collaborator businesses where there is little to no overlap, good will and good values underpinning joint work and mutual reciprocity in kindness in directing work towards one another.
Before we rule out working with competitors however, there are times where working with them might actually pay dividends-
Sharing resource and expertise- sometimes sharing access to resources like buildings, technical equipment or specialist assets can actually help both companies save money.
Get access to broader markets- for example two organisations might cooperate to deliver a mutual benefit- like rolling out a licensed service model being sold by a small company to a big company’s markets, and giving each financial benefit and scale by doing so.
Sell each other knowledge and expertise, or cooperate in exchanges of knowledge which are mutually beneficial.
Coinvesting in the same space, for example testing new market, sales or business development methodologies and reducing the overall overhead of researching new business development opportunities.
It can of course be difficult to trust a competitor, and especially if this involves sharing sensitive information, this can sometimes be overcome by carefully crafted agreements, copyrighting and trademarking ways of working. Usurping can and does happen, for example, one independent trader got offered a direct contract to supply a major supermarket chain, but couldn’t fulfil the orders as a lone trader. They brought in a secondary subcontractor to supply and during negotiations the contractor usurped the relationships with the supermarket and secured the contract for itself, offering the independent trader a job after the contract was agreed. The contractor was put out of business so agreed.
Examples of successful collaboration exist all around us though, so we need to be wary that it is achievable to collaborate with a competitor if the right principles exist, and limited knowledge is shared.
Leaders play a role in fostering these relationships.
There is no doubt that most of these conversations are a top down conversation, when your businesses’ integrity and future business opportunities is at stake. Leaders can help to define the goals of the partnership and develop a plan for achieving them, as well as define the levels of trust and resolve conflict in working with other organisations. They need to champion these within the overall organisation and set parameters of knowledge that can be shared. Ultimately, relationships with other organisations are only as good as the foundational relationships- it is critical these come from the top.
What we are working on this month:
Successful Coaching has secured a new contract as Regional Collaborative Adviser for Worcestershire on the Preventing school exclusions: collaboration for change project which is about helping to coach Local Authority, CAMHS and schools management to work closely together to prevent school exclusions across Worcs working with the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
CEO book
Curtis Harren and Anna Day are co-authoring a chief executive book, which is well underway now. We are still seeking voices to be a part of the book who would like to share case studies of their personal CEO development journeys. For more information please contact anna@successfulcoaching.co.uk