Measuring the Quality of Relationships

Business revolves around relationships. Learn how to assess and measure the quality of relationships with key audiences.

Good relationships fuel business success. Like the chemicals in gasoline, relationships have ingredients that react together to dictate the quality and strength. Those four ingredients are trust, commitment, satisfaction, and control mutuality.

Companies can use these four characteristics to repair strained relationships or as a means for systematically improving relationships with key audiences.

Four Relationship Characteristics

Trust is the willingness to open oneself to another party. Many negative business situations result from a lack of trust:

• Employees unionize because they feel the company doesn't care about them.
• Customers find new vendors because of unfulfilled promises.
• Executives stonewall reporters because of previous coverage.

Commitment is the amount of energy both parties are willing to put into the relationship. Relationships often fall apart when one party begins to put less energy into the relationship or, in some cases, puts so much energy into it that the other party becomes uncomfortable.

Satisfaction occurs when both parties feel favorably about the relationship and positively meet one another's expectations. Satisfaction is neither one-sided nor co-dependent. Both parties must feel satisfied based upon what the other party is doing but also know they are doing the right thing to make the other party feel satisfied.

Control mutuality is the degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to influence one another. Supervisors and their direct reports understand that the supervisor has the rightful power to direct the group's activities. At the same time, the direct reports have the rightful power to determine their loyalty based upon how the supervisor treats them.

Why Quality Relationships Are Important

The prominence of the word "relations" in major corporate functions shows the importance of relationships -- customer relations, labor relations, employee relations, investor relations, etc. Customer relationship management is a significant and growing movement among companies trying to find any competitive edge that they can.

Trust, commitment, satisfaction, and control mutuality are useful in examining strained relationships that are negatively impacting a business. Those strained relationships could be among internal parties or between the company and an external group. Whichever the case, these characteristics are a starting point to begin diagnosing what may be wrong with the relationship and how to fix it.

The characteristics can become part of strategic planning. Every organization should focus on building trust with employees, customers, and vendors. Beyond that, the organization may have some other important relationships (e.g. analysts, media, or stockholders) that are critical to ongoing success. The other three characteristics also present strategic opportunities for companies committed to strong relationships.

Finally, companies can use the four characteristics to actually measure the quality of key relationships on a regular basis. The Institute for Public Relations (www.instituteforpr.com) features Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations, which Dr. Linda Hon and Dr. James Grunig published in 1999. The paper provides a thorough discussion of measuring relationships and how to interpret the results.