- Hello, everyone. Episode 14 is about to start, and I'm very excited to introduce my guest today.

- Her name is Jenny Santi, and she's a former colleague of mine from our time doing MBA at INSEAD. Originating from the Philippines, but residing in New York City, Jenny is an artist, book author, and psychotherapist.

- She started painting as she found solace in art while healing from a bout with desperation and burnout from her social impact career. Her works are held by collectors across the US and Asia, including the musician, Lionel Richie.

- Jenny's evolution into painting allowed her to extend the range of her creative abilities. She's the author of a book called "The Giving Way to Happiness: Stories and Science Behind the Life-Changing Power of Giving." No other than the one and only Deepak Chopra has contributed with the forewords to her book. Jenny's varied corporate and creative experiences can forge her strength in being a relationship counselor and a psychotherapist.

- It is in this capacity that I've invited Jenny to talk to us today about building trust in business partnerships. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Jenny Santi to the virtual stage.

- Hi, Jenny. How are you?

- Hi, Emil, great to see you. Thanks for having me.

- Absolutely. And thanks for coming on my podcast. I really appreciate your willingness to talk to me about today's topic. And actually, for everyone else, what we're gonna talk about today is business partnerships and how people that are involved in these partnerships can build trust among each other so they can work, hopefully successfully, going forward, as they go forward with their partnership. Before we dive into the topic, a couple of things that I'd like to mention. As usual, I'm gonna have a little ticker at the bottom where I have a call to action for everyone interested in learning more about Jenny, to go to cerebrations.info and see her bio there and learn more about her experiences. Also, on the website, you can find other episodes of the podcast and you can learn more about the guests who were featured in those episodes. So I absolutely recommend for those who haven't been to the website, to go and check it out. So now that we are done with this house cleaning item, Jenny, I'd like to ask you to quickly introduce yourself. I've already provided a little bit of introduction for you for this episode, but it's always better to hear it directly from the guest on the episodes. So if you don't mind, can you walk us through your journey? How did you get into relationship counseling for business partnerships?

- Sure, Emil. A running theme in my life is that I've always been into personal development, self-development. And in the same way that I'm interested in doing that for myself, I also personally get a great deal of satisfaction from helping others become the best version of themselves. I have benefited from a lot of counseling, of executive coaching. I've done a lot of the heavy lifting, working on myself through the years. So with that and also with my formal training and my work now as a psychotherapist, I feel that I'm in a unique position to really tackle this issue of business partnerships, relationships between business partners, because a business partnership is just like any relationship. And as you can imagine, as someone goes through psychotherapy, it's all about talking about one's relationships with colleagues, with loved ones, with themselves. And because I do have that formal education and training in mental health, I won't shy away from helping my clients process these difficult emotions that have to do with these relationships, and really understand the business aspect of it because of my own experience of surviving and thriving in both a corporate world and an entrepreneurial life.

- Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that background with us. So you mentioned that you're engaged in this counseling actively with clients, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of different situations. So one of the first things I wanted to ask you is, what are some of the main attributes that make a healthy business partnership? How can you ensure, first of all, that that partnership is healthy and what you should be striving?

- Sure.

- To maintain to make it

- Yes.

- continuously healthy.

- It goes back to the idea that a business partnership is just like any relationship. And for one, you have to have shared goals and a shared vision, that is essential. And secondly, you have to communicate really well. It's really the cornerstone of any successful partnership, whether it's a business, it's a marriage, it's a friendship, it's a family. You have to have open and honest dialogue to be able to resolve conflicts and make decisions together. I'll say the third thing is trust. And we'll get into that later. Trust and loyalty are vital. You have to have trust in each other's skills, judgment, and commitment to the goal that you have, commitment to the business and to each other. And then another thing that makes a business partnership healthy is a fair division of responsibilities. You know, just like in a household, you would divide the chores, you would divide the responsibilities in a business. And then of course, we have to have financial agreements in place too. You have to have that written down cleanly, neatly because there are often shared investments, shared responsibilities, and finally, the legal aspect should be taken care of too. It's tantamount. I mean, whether or not you trust each other's word, I think you still have to have a legal agreement in place.

- Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting you mentioned legal at the end, because I think for a lot of people, it's probably one of the first things that they think of, but also it's one of the things that they dread the most in terms of how do they make sure that they've covered all the areas and they haven't left any gaps that's maybe used to exploit their part of the relationship. But let me, I think it's a good segue to the second question I wanted to ask you. What are some of the common issues that come up in business partner relationships? And issues, I think, from that point of view of challenges and some of the risks, I guess, and then maybe we can talk about some of the positive things about it as well. But since we start talking about legal and being able to ensure that you're covered and your partner is covered, let's start on that side of things.

- Sure. An issue that comes up a lot is the issue of fairness in business partnerships. And sometimes it's even just a perception of unequal distribution of work. Because I'm sure you've come across this exercise where if you each give, Let's say, two business partners or members of a group pie chart and ask them to illustrate what amount of X are you contributing? How much work are you doing to make this happen? And most people will put more than 50%, right? Most people exaggerate the amount of work that they're doing and probably underestimate the amount of work the other person is doing. So the exercise is something like, you each give each person a pie chart, and then ask them to show, okay, how much of this is your contribution? And they both think they've contributed more than the other. So there's frequently this perception that there's an unfair distribution of work contribution or financial remuneration or equity distribution, that's a very common theme. The other common issue is basically conflict, just managing conflict of any sort and behaviors that come up, whether it's criticizing each other, showing contemp for each other, being hostile with each other because of difficulties in communication, difficulties in expressing one's needs. That comes up all the time. And given the nature of the business environment, there will always be some conflict. And then another issue that comes up is more the human side of things. Just the feeling of being understood. You know, the feeling of being seen and appreciated and understood as a human being. And this might sound like it's too soft of an issue, but it comes up so much. It's not just because someone has had a financial or a legal dispute. Usually, the origin of that has to do with just this feeling of, I'm not seen, I'm not appreciated, you don't understand me, and so we can't reach an agreement when it comes to this financial contract or this legal contract. And finally, the issue of trust, which we'll get more into later.

- Okay. Actually, as you were talking, I thought of a potential scenario that kind of relates to that. But adds an additional angle to it, I believe sometimes some partnerships may be asymmetrical. I call them asymmetrical because one of the two sides may be in a little stronger position of power than the other. And it may be just based on financial size, like a small business versus a larger corporation. Or even on an international level, if you're trying to enter markets that requires you to partner with someone locally, otherwise, you have no chance, like the government is not gonna let you play there without the partnership. You still have this kind of disproportionate concentration of power. So is that something that you've experienced in your relationships with customers? Do you have any kind of suggestions about that? Any advice about that?

- Absolutely. Which is why when advising someone who is assessing for fit with a potential business partner, I would say, first of all, know yourself and what do you want in a business partner. In the first place, why do you want a business partner? What are your strengths? Know your strengths and your weaknesses as well. What are you looking for? Are you looking for complementary skills? And for sure, you should be looking for complementarity to avoid duplication of effort, because if you're too similar with your business partner, it might create an environment where you're not helping each other, you're not collaborating, you're actually competing.

- Yeah.

- Because you're interested in the same things. Whether you're interested in maybe publicity personally or maybe you're interested in just having a public persona. So all those things come into play and everyone has a different set of things that are predictive of what they're going to value in a business partnership. For me, for example, I wanna see, If I'm assessing someone for fit as a business partner, I would like to see that person in different contexts. I would like to see that person in a restaurant, for example, and see a simple thing as how do they treat the server? How do they treat this person who has no financial value in their life whatsoever, apart from just serving them a meal that one night, and that matters to me, just how considerate, kind, polite is this person, and socially, does this person act appropriately? Another things like, again, for me personally, I value things as preparation. How prepared is this person when we are showing up to conferences or meetings? That's why you really have to see the person in different contexts. Not just in a business meaning, not just in a one kind of context. And then I'm sure you've heard this in consulting and recruitment, they ask themselves, do I wanna be stuck with this person in an airport, in an airport lounge, right?

- Yeah. Do they make me feel like it's worth my time being with this person? Because as you can imagine, if you're truly gonna be business partners with someone, you're gonna spend a hell of a lot of time with this person, probably even more than you spend with your spouse, with your kids, with your friends. So what quality of life do you want? Is this really a person that you want to spend a lot of your time with, beyond the money? Some people just get stuck on the attractiveness of the money at stake, like the financial gains at stake, but what about things like, okay, do I really wanna be around this person and make this person a part of my day-to-day life? Do they make me feel good? Are they overall beneficial for the quality of my life? And then everyone has a different idea of what that looks like.

- Yeah. When you were saying earlier that business partnerships are a lot like personal relationships, and you mentioned here, do I wanna be stuck with this person at the airport, or how do they behave when I invite them to, something that's completely unrelated to the partnership, whether it's dinner or some other social event, I was thinking how when I was younger, I would always judge my friendships only after I've been able to travel somewhere with those friends.

- Yeah.

- Because someone may be a great friend when they're right next to you in our comfort zones, whatever we are, and in the moment we travel somewhere, we are outside of our comfort zones, both of us, the behavior changes. So if you cannot live with this person, if you cannot deal with this person, then obviously there's something wrong. So that just reminded me.

- Yeah. It gives me an idea. Actually, that's a really good, It could be a really good litmus test for whether you wanna be in a business partnership with someone, right? Go on a big trip first and see how does that person behave because you have so many contexts in which you can observe that person, from planning to splitting bills, to what is it? Waking up on time, and just having common interests or divergent interests. You'll see, right?

- Yeah, you'll see it immediately.

- And when, when you're doing a trip, particularly a roughing it kind of adventure, you really can see what the person is good at and not great at. And you can see if that person is reliable, if that person has empathy, and if that person can support you in the journey quite literally.

- Yeah, I think, I don't know if we can turn this into some sort of a consulting service or not, but for me it's always been, You know, when I was younger, I would always judge my relationships that way. I mean, in a way, I may enjoy someone as a great friend, but I always would keep in the back of my mind, have I traveled with this person? Have I been somewhere with this person?

- Yeah. I think for a romantic relationship for sure, right? Travel with a person first and see how that goes. Yeah.

- Yeah. Well, you mentioned several times the topic of building trust, and obviously it's the main topic of the podcast episode, so maybe we can dive into it now. So how do you build trust? How do you evaluate your partner's trustworthiness? But even from the very beginning, I mean, obviously trust takes time. So how do you, At least in the beginning, with the limited amount of information you have, if you haven't traveled with this person or whatever, you don't know too much about them, how do you say, this is enough for me to know that I can trust this person, and later on, how do you keep building on that trust, or how do you remedy some the things so that there could be more trust in the future?

- You know, because I'm a psychotherapist, people trust me with a lot of their issues. And I think, I actually think it's not fair for me to just assume they will trust me. I think even for a person like me who's bound by confidentiality rules, you know, the HIPAA rules and all that, I'd like to remind myself that it takes time to build and to earn trust. I'll give you an example. I once had a client, a patient, I use those words interchangeably in the mental health setting. I once had this client who we had seen each other for several sessions, and I had this feeling that this guy doesn't really have a problem. Why is he in therapy? And I was new. I was fairly new in my training, so I just thought, oh, maybe you just want someone to talk to. I'll just go with the flow. And then after so many sessions, he goes quiet and suddenly tells me, "There's something I really have to tell you." Like, wow, only

- This is a scary stuff.

- This is a scary stuff. This is a scary stuff. And only then, only then in that moment did he actually tell me what his real problems are. And I can't tell you what they are, but I was completely shocked, I thought, and all this time I thought there was really nothing to discuss. All this time you've been talking about very surface level things. So I think trust has to do with a feeling of psychological safety, the feeling that you can really be yourself without criticism. And a huge part of developing this psychological safety, it only really comes through time, through experiencing just day-to-day things, day-to-day challenges. Well, when it comes to trust, there are really several aspects. And one has to do with reliability. Reliability, consistency. Are you being consistent in your actions? Do you meet your commitments? Do you honor your commitments? And can I trust you with a deadline, for example? That's one. Another area where you should really trust your business partner is in the area of competence. Competence and expertise. And again, this is something you can only demonstrate through time, right? I mean, you can show your fancy resume, but how do you really demonstrate your competence and your skills? It's over time that you get to see that, or maybe you have a track record and you really have to show that you're consistent with that. But also you had to demonstrate an interest in continuous learning. So a commitment to ongoing learning and improvement helps you trust that someone is competent and is as reliable as an expert. 'cause you do wanna partner with someone who's competent and an expert. The other thing is just the ability to accept responsibility and to take accountability, because mistakes inevitably happen. There will be setbacks, you will come across situations where, whoops, that was a mistake, that didn't work, or that meeting, we blew, you know, we sucked at that meeting. That was terrible. But how much is that person able to accept responsibility? And how much is that person willing to solve problems and collaborate on solutions when these issues inevitably arise? You wanna be able to trust person's ability to take responsibility. I think trust also comes with being able to communicate your expectations very clearly, because we're really bad at this as human beings. You know, we have expectations, but we don't really vocalize them. And then when they're not met, we feel like, oh, I don't trust you anymore. But did you even define your expectations in the first place? Did you define each other's roles and responsibilities? Your expectations in order to avoid misunderstandings? What do you really want? And then trust also comes through transparency. How transparent are you? How forthcoming are you when it comes to sharing information? I mean, no one's perfect, right? So are you just always gonna present yourself as a flawless human being or are you gonna say, okay, these are my weaknesses, these are the times I wasn't my best, and these are the areas where I need support. So these are just some of the many, many, many things that build trust. And again, it, it happens over time. And for sure there are people who, maybe by virtue of how they conduct themselves, how they speak or how they look at you, their ability to make eye contact, they immediately command trust. And I'm sure you've met a person where you feel like, oh, I just met you, but I feel like I can tell you everything.

- Yeah,

- Right? Okay, that's wonderful and that's such a gift, but the reality is that it really comes over time.

- What about situ- I mean, you mentioned a little bit of communication and setting the expectations clearly, but obviously over time, expectations might change and you may want to, I mean, you also mentioned the exercise of asking people to indicate how much they contribute to the partnership and everyone saying that they contribute more than 50%. So over time, you may think that you want to equalize the partnership relationship more, but you're afraid that you've already built some trust and that trust may disappear or maybe at risk because you are asking for more and you didn't ask earlier. Is that an issue that you see in general?

- Absolutely, it comes up, which is why another fruitful exercise would be to just have regular check-ins with your business partner or business partners, as in a scheduled meeting to discuss any progress, any changes to address any concerns proactively and not just, So that you don't necessarily have to accost your business partner and suddenly say, "Hey, Emil, we have to talk," and create a scenario where, oh my god, what's come up? But you expect these regular scheduled meetings, these regular feedback sessions, maybe on a monthly basis at least, so you can provide constructive feedback to help each other and to also see how the business is doing and see how the partnership itself is doing.

- Okay. Yeah. That's a great advice in general because I think it happens. Especially in the corporate world, a lot of times, partnerships are being created sometimes even just as a signal to the market, right? Hey, we are having all these partnerships going on, but then nothing happens for a long time. Maybe because the business is such that it takes a long time. And if you don't have this constant communication, I feel like things fizzle out over time. And then at one point you're almost like, wait a minute, I know we had some partnership, but I don't really know what you want from me because it's been more than a year since we last spoke. So I think that's a great advice that you mentioned about having the constant check-ins and just making sure that people are on the same page all the time. So we're approaching the end of the episodes, and I always ask my guests to provide some final words of advice for either those that are currently in a business partnership or those are planning to be involved in a business partnership. So what are some of the key takeaways that you would like to highlight here?

- I guess the most important thing is really to treat a business partnership just like any relationship, and not think of it as, oh, it's just a business. I mean, this is so important. It takes up so much of our time, and it has so many consequences for us on so many levels, emotionally, financially, mentally. So just first and foremost, think of your business partner as a person and really try to understand that person. What is that person wanting to achieve? What are you trying to build together? Communicate with that person and be loyal to each other. And I think that that's what's super important. And there's a saying that's been said many, many times that the quality of your life is dictated by the quality of your relationships. So I would say that in accordance with that, with that idea that the quality of your business is probably dictated by the strength of your business partnership, right? And if you truly feel like you have each other's back, then, I mean, of course, there will be extraneous factors such as the state of the economy and the demand for your products and services. But at least if that business partnership is solid, whether or not your business succeeds, at least you have a really, really good relationship and you feel like you at least have a friend.

- Well, thanks for these final words of advice. Jenny, thank you for participating in this episode. It's been a pleasure hosting you, and I hope to host you again in the future.

- Thank you so much, Emil. This is such a pleasure.

- Thank you. Bye.