Understanding your partner – in good & bad times

If you are starting a new business you should know that you won’t always have all the resources to grow the business and that partnerships down the road are unavoidable. At the start of a new relationship almost no one thinks about divorce since one looks positively into the future. Similar to social partnerships. ☺

In business life things might get out of hand as the business goes too good and one of the partners starts to take too many risks or as the business goes too bad so that you cannot enjoy life due to loss becoming a standard issue resulting from various reasons, not always agreed on by all the partners.

If asked for help in such situations, in social life consultants advise you to have empathy for your partner. In business life the synonym for empathy is called “perspective taking”. It is the process of temporarily suspending one’s own point-of-view in an attempt to view a situation as someone else might, in the case of a partnership your partner.

Several strategies used for taking another’s perspective have been identified, including using one’s own similar past experience and applying general knowledge to the case on the way that people are likely to react in particular situations.

Easier said than done! It can only be successful if one leaves feelings out of the scene since the perspective-taking process does not necessitate any form of affinity, compassion, or emotional identification with the other.

If not… even the egos won’t allow the partners to apply such a thinking process. We suddenly do not understand our business partner anymore. And unfortunately in business life a “kiss” cannot make-up for the connection “lost”, just like in some cases in social life. ☺

The song of the week: Sheryl Crow – The First Cut Is The Deepest (2003)