In four or five conversations over the last week I have come back to the article ‘How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight’ which provides great insight into conflict resolution inside a management team or with customers and partners.

In my conversations, the focus was on how we build stronger go to market partnerships with our partners and one of the key starting points is this:

• Focus on the facts. Arm yourselves with a wealth of data about your business and your competitors. This encourages you to debate critical issues, not argue out of ignorance.

Example: Star Electronics’* top team “measured everything”: bookings, backlogs, margins, engineering milestones, cash, scrap, work-in-process. They also tracked competitors’ moves, including product introductions, price changes, and ad campaigns.

How many times do customer or partner relationships go sideways when people do not agree on the facts? When a joint  scorecard or some common form of measuring reality (e.g. a service level agreement with key performance metrics) are not in place, the conversations do not focus on moving the business forward, they often start with data debates.

One of my first mentors always said ‘Perception is reality’, and I have always found that to be true. If I believe one thing – deeply – it is my reality and the basis upon which I make decisions. Which means that to be successful with a customer or a partner, you must start with an agreed upon ‘reality’, and that means investing in a joint scorecard. It will pay off.