Business relationships seem to be top of the agenda this week.
In his speech to the Rotorua Chamber of Commerce, Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe said the most important things in business were people and communication. This week's high achiever, Whakarewarewa Thermal Village's Julia Schuster-Rika, says business is all
about building relationships, and columnist Rod Meharry this week tackles the issue.
Everything is based on building successful relationships - your employment relations, productivity, staff morale, brand image, sales successes and supply consistency.
We all prefer to work with people we get along with and to do business with people we feel we can trust and rely on to meet their obligations.
Sound relationship-building tends to be a top-down thing and it was interesting to hear that Rob Fyfe has handed much of the financial side of Air New Zealand over to an assistant chief executive so he can focus on people and communication.
How the top dog relates to the department managers feeds into how those managers interact with staff and into how staff work with customers and suppliers.
The more you trust your staff with information about the business and enable them to participate in decision-making, the greater their sense of ownership and the greater their input, and output, will be.
The same is true of external relationships. While you are likely to be more circumspect about sharing commercially sensitive information with outsiders, enabling customers and suppliers to become more involved in the business will create loyalty and trust.
You don't have to invite them to the AGM or give them voting powers. It can be as simple as keeping them up to date via a regular newsletter.
Harmony within the workplace is not going to just happen. That, too, requires good management and good relationships between management and staff.
Identifying and dealing quickly with situations or personalities that are not conducive to good relations will stop poor relationships developing. Identifying people who are natural leaders or relationship-builders and using those qualities to the business' advantage will benefit everybody.
