Who Do You Want to Work With? Choosing Better Business Relationships

The biggest risk in a business relationship often isn't the product or service. It's the people behind it.

I've been thinking about this lately in the context of vendors, but the more I think about it, the more broadly it applies. Vendors, employees, business partners and even clients all present the same basic question: what are these people actually going to be like to work with?

We usually start by evaluating capability. Can they provide the service? Do they have the right experience? Does the product have the features we need? Is the price reasonable? Those are important questions, but they only tell you whether the relationship makes sense on paper.

They don't tell you whether someone will follow through when they say they will, whether they'll communicate when something changes, or whether they genuinely care about the outcome they promised.

Those things are harder to measure at the beginning. Over time, though, they often become much more important than the original feature list or proposal.

Business relationships become clearer after the sale

We've all dealt with some version of the salesperson selling the proverbial widget. They tell you it does X, Y and Z, and Z happens to be particularly important to you. You ask about it directly, you're assured it works, and you make the purchase.

Then you start using it and discover that Z technically exists, but not quite in the way it was presented. Maybe it only works under certain circumstances. Maybe another service is required. Maybe the implementation is incomplete.

I don't think that mistake alone tells you very much about the company. People misunderstand things. Salespeople get technical details wrong. Products have limitations that aren't always obvious. I've certainly been wrong about things before, and anyone who works in technology long enough eventually will be.

What tells you much more is what happens next.

A vendor I want to keep working with will want to understand what happened. They'll investigate, explain what they find and look for another way to accomplish what we were trying to do. If what they originally told me was wrong, they'll acknowledge it. They may not be able to solve the problem, but there should at least be some indication that the outcome matters to them.

The opposite experience is revealing in a different way. Responses start taking longer. Follow-ups become necessary. Eventually you get an apology, but no real resolution. If you decide to cancel, nobody seems particularly concerned.

At that point, the missing feature is no longer the biggest issue. You've learned something about the business relationship itself.

Are you actually a good fit for each other?

There's another part of choosing who to work with that I think gets overlooked: sometimes you simply aren't their ideal client.

That's not necessarily a problem. You don't have to be the biggest account on someone's books to receive good service, and every business has customers that are more strategically important than others. There should still be a genuine commitment to making the relationship work.

You can usually tell when that commitment isn't there. Response times gradually stretch out. Work gets mostly completed, but the last pieces linger. Follow-up happens only when you initiate it. Something promised for Tuesday becomes Thursday, then next week, and eventually you're spending an uncomfortable amount of time managing the company you hired to make your life easier.

The same basic pattern can appear with employees. Someone can interview extremely well and genuinely want the job. The more useful information comes later, once the novelty has worn off and the work has become routine. Do they remain engaged? Do they communicate when something goes wrong? Do they finish what they start? Do they take ownership of the result?

You can't answer those questions from one interaction. What you're looking for is a pattern.

Good business relationships don't require perfection

There is a danger in judging people too quickly.

Good employees miss deadlines. Good vendors occasionally drop the ball. People get overwhelmed, make mistakes and misunderstand instructions. If your standard is that nobody can ever disappoint you, you're eventually going to run out of people to work with.

What matters is how someone behaves consistently, especially when things aren't going well.

If a person knows they're going to miss a deadline and tells you beforehand, explains what changed and gives you a realistic new date, that tells you something. If they make a mistake and immediately take responsibility for correcting it, that tells you something too.

In some cases, I've trusted people more after watching them handle a mistake well than I did before it happened.

What concerns me is the opposite pattern. Commitments repeatedly require reminders. Problems are explained away instead of owned. Communication gets difficult whenever something isn't going well. You're always the person asking what happened, when it will be done and what comes next.

Eventually, repeated behaviour stops being a collection of exceptions. It becomes useful information about what you can expect from the relationship.

Character shows up in small places

Some of the most useful clues about people appear well before anything seriously goes wrong.

I've always thought you can learn a surprising amount about someone by watching how they treat people who can't immediately do anything for them. How do they respond when there isn't an obvious sale involved? How do they talk about former employees or difficult clients? How do they behave when an interaction isn't particularly important to them?

None of these things are perfect tests of character. Context matters, and I wouldn't make a major business decision because someone was short with another person one afternoon. Over time, though, small interactions start forming a picture.

Communication works the same way. Does somebody tell you about a problem before you discover it yourself? Do they follow up simply because they said they would? After delivering something, do they check whether it actually solved the problem?

This is where the old idea of going the extra mile still has some value. It doesn't mean endless free work or being available at all hours. It means caring enough about the outcome to do the small things that aren't explicitly required.

Those are often the things you remember.

Choosing the business relationships you want to keep

The older I get, the less interested I am in finding the perfect product, employee or vendor.

I'm much more interested in finding good people to work with.

Products change. Technology changes. Businesses change. The exact service you need today may look completely different three years from now. A strong working relationship can usually adapt to those changes far better than a technically perfect arrangement with people you don't trust.

So when I'm deciding who I want around me, I pay attention to fairly simple things. Do they communicate clearly? Do they follow through? Are they willing to define what they're going to deliver and how we'll know whether it worked? When something goes wrong, do they take ownership of it? Does their behaviour over time suggest they are genuinely interested in making the relationship successful?

You don't need perfection from the people you work with. You do need a reasonable idea of what you can expect from them.

In the end, some of the most valuable people to have around you are simply the ones who do what they say they're going to do, and who tell you before you have to ask when they can't.