Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Building trusting relationships in outsourcing: a primer

The prerequisites for trust are:

• honesty and openness

• cultural compatibility

• acceptance of significant ongoing change

• acceptance of each other’s economic realities

• the mechanism to audit and measure.

Maintaining trust:

• involves optimizing ‘open book’ relationships

• employing trust brokers – third parties can assess, reaffirm and share the parties’ value and contribution throughout the life of the relationship

• makes defining responsibilities less of an issue:

  • less definition is required in a trust-based relationship

  • responsibilities usually become an issue in the context of failures rather than successes

  • trust enables a shared focus on defining how failures will be managed and how repetition will ...