Call for Trust via Confrontation

We provide coaching services to help you deal with your most difficult issues. We help you confront (co-front or co-face), head on, a lack of trust within your alliance. This will bring increased trust into the alliance’s climate and enable greater value discovery and value-creation.

Trust is the fundamental issue in every relationship. As long-term value-creating relationships, trust is especially critical in strategic alliances. There is a direct correlation between the level of trust and the amount of value created in an alliance.

The greater the level of trust in your alliance,
the greater your alliance’s ability to
uncover and create incremental value.

Problem

What can you do if the level of trust is unacceptably low? How can you bring greater trust into your alliance? These are the challenges we help you address. These issues are also discussed in the whitepaper Building Trust in Strategic Alliances: enabling greater value. This ASAP Best Practice presents the counter-intuitive argument that you should use confrontation to actually call for trust, and then trust that trust will come.

What must we do in order to use confrontation to call for trust?

Solution

We need to realize that there are subtle yet significant differences between conflict (attacking the other) and confrontation (jointly facing an issue in the relationship, in the midst). This subtlety is often lost in the heat of emotionally-charged discussions.

Confrontation is a powerful tool, requiring the loving use of delicate skills, as well as mindfulness, in order to help the parties co-front (collaboratively face) the most difficult issues in their relationship.

Our coaching services will help you become clear about perspective, or how you choose to see another. It is critically important to be aware of and mindful of our perspectives throughout a healthy confrontational process.

Where are we focusing our attention: on the issue or on the other?

Being in a collaborative or loving mindset deeply affects perspective and is therefore fundamental to being in healthy confrontation, rather than counterproductive conflict. A conflict-oriented mindset comes from a sense of separation, divisiveness, “me vs. you,” scarcity, and fear. We are often unaware of these subtle distinctions, and so we need a trusted other (a coach) to help us see this in ourselves.

Beyond how we choose to see the other party, our perspectives on time and value are also important. Do we have timeless patience? Are will willing to take time out of our busy day to deal with our most difficult challenges? Do we appreciate the intangible forms of value (e.g., trust, organizational learning, and risk mitigation) which are often more important than the tangible forms (incremental revenue)?

Results

The level of trust in your alliance will grow, deepen and expand.
The pervading atmosphere will grow to be healthier and more collaborative.
More incremental value opportunities will be uncovered, discovered and developed.
Greater creativity will naturally occur, throughout your alliance.

Ultimately the 2-Slide MethodologyTM is a process of confrontation. It is a process of facing the opportunities, issues and solutions that live within the alliance itself, in that collection of relationships.