Building trust for mutual benefit
In an article titled SMEs of Tomorrow - Tips to drive growth in 2022, trust is highlighted as an important driver of growth. It says: “To ensure resilient, stable supply chains, SMEs must cultivate an ecosystem of trusted supply-chain partners, and the agility to pivot between various suppliers and strategies … [Businesses must] have contingencies for common hurdles and disruptions in place.”
This doesn’t come as any surprise to us at Kyocera, where trust is a pivotal part of our philosophy: “Mutual trust enables all workers, even superiors and subordinates, to frankly disclose their true feelings. With such honesty, everyone can see problems clearly and work together in a smooth, harmonious way. To establish such relationships of mutual trust, you must make daily efforts to strengthen the bonds between all employees.”
Trust is so ingrained in the way we work that a quick search for “trust” on our philosophy website, brings up “trust management”, “trust business”, “trust group”, “trust products”, “trust employees” and “trust information”. That’s a whole lot of very important trust!
We understand that without trust the company cannot function holistically – without trust, our teams wouldn’t maintain cohesive or collaborate proficiently. In fact, without trust, we would never have been able to handle the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years.
This trust extends to our relationships with our partners. We see trust as the social glue that holds our business relationships together.
By constantly working at building honest, mutually beneficial relationships based on trust, we build the business with an emphasis on long-term thinking about consequences, honouring commitments, communicating effectively, being helpful and showing people you care.
The wheels of 2022 have started turning and we will turn to trust again – to steer our business through what will, no doubt, be another challenging year. But I have no doubt that this trust will help us achieve growth and prosperity.
Lee-Ann Kellner - Channel Sales Manager - KYOCERA Document Solutions South Africa
