A few years ago, I called the president of one of my carrier partners to discuss some performance issues that seemed at the time to have been completely avoidable. These issues were related to earlier problems that we at my company believed had already been resolved.

The conversation started out very amiably; I got the impression that the president wasn’t expecting a complaint and that he believed this was purely a social call.

As I went on to discuss the recent performance issues and our collective failure to sustain the original resolution, the conversation started to get a bit strained. I began to think that he should have been more aware of what was happening with a longstanding partner account like ours. At that point I said to him that I didn’t believe he was fully engaged in his business—or at least not in my part of his business.

He clearly was taken aback by my comment and said that he would come out to see me the next day—even though he was 1,000 miles away. But he did come, and we spent the afternoon together discussing what I had meant by “fully engaged.” He was convinced that he had always been engaged in the business, and he found it puzzling that I could think otherwise.

The long and short of that very enlightening day was that we came to realize that we had never established “rules of engagement” for our professional relationship. We had never expressed our expectations concerning problem resolution, including how and when we would communicate about service issues.

The fact that he was more of a “macro” manager while I was the quintessential “micro” manager also set the stage for disagreement: I was irritated that issues that were very hot to me didn’t reach the same temperature with him. Maybe, he said, if we had set out these parameters and expectations in the beginning and reviewed our progress (or lack of it) on a routine basis, this conversation would not have been necessary.

Not long after that meeting, I watched a military/ legal action thriller called Rules of Engagement. The standard given in the movie for when, where, how, and against whom force should be used to achieve the desired results prompted me to think back to the meeting with the president of my carrier partner. Had I been fair with him? Were my expectations regarding his degree of involvement and awareness of detail appropriate? I realized that I had not been fair, and that I should have considered his need to delegate downward his company’s day-to-day operations.

This realization prompted me to research the military’s formal definition of rules of engagement. The definition states, in part, that the rules must:

• Provide a consistent, understandable, and repeatable standard for how to act; and
• Assist in the synchronization of political and military components of a strategy.

By reading “political” as representing the shipper and “military” as standing in for the carrier, I learned a valuable lesson. If I was going to preach the value of partnerships, then there should be no junior partners or senior partners. There should only be equal partners, with both sides sharing not only strategic aims, but also good times and bad, wherever and whenever they may happen.

To some people, being fully engaged means nothing more than being informed on a timely basis; to others, it means spending quality time and energy on routine operations. Still others believe that it means closely following strategic metrics.

My advice to all shippers is simple: Make sure that you have communicated with everyone involved in your internal and external partnerships, and that you have agreed together on the definitions for expectations, methods, timing, performance, economics, and completion. Then, following the “no job too large, no results too small” philosophy, remain fully engaged in the relationship or project through to completion.