“Being a Good Partner”的英语演讲稿

“Being a Good Partner”的英语演讲稿
学会与人合作

Everyone likes to have a partner. Someone in the trenches with them, trying to achieve the same goals. Yet, I suspect that if I were to ask around, I'd find most people in IT or software development would say they don't have enough partners they really consider to be a partner.I spend half my day today meeting with the management team of a vendor that I have been working with for the last several months. The relationship had hit some snags, and wasn't working as we really wanted. We spent the afternoon talking about that, trying to work out what had happened and what we could do to get back on track. I'm completely spent from it. I want to develop a real partnership with this vendor, but man, I'm telling you, working on it today really wiped me out.This leads to the first law of Partnership: Being a partner takes energy. I'm hard put to describe why today was so draining. What I can say is that we talked about some hard things. About how I behaved as a customer, how they behaved as vendors. During the discussion, I had to take a long hard look at what I did or didn't do, and how that was part of the problem. I really wanted (in a dark corner of my soul) to just blame them for all the problems and be done with it. But that wouldn't put me in the way of being much of a partner.The second law of Partnership? Being a Partner takes communication. For 4 hours today we talked. Part of the time it was about fun things, like visiting the international sites to see how things were going there. Part of the time was about the problems that we were having and how we had discovered them. Prior to this meeting, I had many conversations with my counterpart on the other side about what we could do to get on track. We even wrote a talking points document together to organize our thoughts about what we wanted to do today. But today, all that was put aside and we just talked together.A1 Technology in their blog on outsourcing cites a study by Ernst & Young which says (in part)Another important finding of Ernst & Young is that many respondents point to poor communication between a vendor and a client as a main obstacle in the way of effective outsourcing partnerships.The third law of Partnership: Being a partner takes honesty. I almost said "integrity". Honesty because it is important that I be honest with myself about my actions and motivations. That I be honest with the partner/vendor about what I see in them and that I tell them what I see going on. Honest to the process and the contract to always do the right things. If you can't be ruthlessly honest, odds are that you won't be a good partner.The fourth law of Partnership: Being a partner takes transparency. I know enough people who think vendors are like mushrooms... they should be kept in the dark and surrounded by cr*p. That is not the path to partnership. Partners need to know what you plan to do, so they can figure out how to help. They need to know the problems you have, so they can offer solutions. They need to know when you are unhappy, so they can do something about it. Partnerships do best in an information rich environment.The fifth law of Partnerships: Being a partner takes trust. This one is sort of a chicken and egg situation. If you are doing the first 4 laws well, then the trust will probably come naturally. But you still need to give over to trust. To give trust them to do the right thing, to want you to be successful. Trust is what enables thoughtful risk taking. Without trust, it is very difficult to not demand proof at every turn.From my experience these are the 5 things I do to be a partner. I could go on with more, but these are the main items. How are you doing? Do you incorporate these items into your daily routine? If so how are your partnerships?