Openness and Trust in Offshore Relationships

Openness and Trust in Offshore Relationships
By Hugo Messer

 

I am reading a book called '100% succesvolle IT-projecten',

written by Klaas Jung and Gerard van de Looi. They write about

the key success factors in IT projects. One of the chapters that

stand out for me is about relationships and openness. They

write:

'The more you open up for the other person, the bigger the

chances that you receive trust. The contradiction is that people

often get more closed, because they are afraid to be punished

for being open. In an atmosphere of mutual trust, you can be

open, you can discuss problems and you solve problems quickly

together. But when we are not open and keep problems for

ourselves, the other starts mistrusting us. In turn, the other

will also react more closed and we create distance.'

In relationships that cross borders, cultures and language, I

believe the challenge for making IT projects work well, depends

on being open even more than in local projects. Openness differs

between cultures. Unless we learn how open another person from

another culture is and expects us to be, communication will get

blocked and trust is low. The goal in an offshore relationship

is to work together comfortably and as we already have distance

in culture, language and geography, we need to decrease the

personal distance.

The authors describe what factors contribute to an equal

relationship on which trust and communication can be built.

1. Respect: If one person has less respect for the other person,

the relationship will grow distant. If one person will be

obedient to the other person, this can lead to suppression. This

is often based on the idea of the customer 'we pay the invoices

so you have to do as we say'. If both sides have respect for

each other, the relationship will be equal and will work well on

longer term. The perception of respect varies strongly across

cultures, so we need to explore how the other person perceives

us and respect for other people in general.

2. Forgiveness: In all projects, people make mistakes. We need

to learn from mistakes to get better. If one person doesn't

forgive the other for his mistakes, the relationship will break

eventually. Culture plays a big role here. In cultures where

hierarchy is important, the relationship between boss and

employee or customer and supplier tends to be different from

cultures with less power-distance.

3. Maintenance: In all human relationships, we need to invest

energy in keeping the relationship healthy. In an IT project, it

is important to invest in the relationship not only in the

offer-phase, but during the whole project. With people being

remote from each other, the challenge here is even bigger as we

have less frequent (face to face) encounters.

4. Fear of conflicts: In an equal relationship, all topics

(positive and negative) can be openly discussed. People can then

openly share problems, without being afraid of a conflict.

People from different cultures tend to have a different attitude

towards conflict. In order to make the relationship strong, we

need to be open and we need to explore from both 'sides' to what

degree we can or cannot create conflict with the other person.