The role of trust in building better partnerships

How can partnership teams make trust visible without turning it into another administrative metric?

In this podcast episode, Sebastian Husein, Impact Development Manager at the University of Twente, shares practical ways to recognise relationship maturity, uncover stakeholder motivation, surface risks early, and keep partnership assumptions open to revision. Read the article or listen to the episode for a practical framework for turning trust into partnership traction:

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Summary

Partnership teams are often asked to demonstrate progress through plans, milestones, and key performance indicators. Yet many collaborations advance or stall for reasons that conventional reporting barely captures: whether people respond, disclose what worries them, involve decision-makers, commit resources, and follow through on what they promise. Sebastian Husein, Impact Development Manager at the University of Twente, argues that these behaviours make trust visible and give partnership professionals something practical to work with.

His approach combines an engineer’s instinct for structure with a deliberate focus on empathy. The aim is not to reduce relationships to a single score, but to help teams observe how a partnership is developing, understand the people behind organisational roles, and intervene with greater purpose. Trust becomes a form of operational intelligence: qualitative evidence that can guide engagement, reveal risk, and help partners move from initial contact towards shared commitment.

Organisations collaborate through people

Partnership work often begins with institutional categories. A stakeholder map might list a university, company, government body, or research partner, while the people representing those organisations appear interchangeable. Sebastian sees a problem in that abstraction. Each person enters a collaboration with their own responsibilities, pressures, ambitions, and connection to the subject.

Organisations are their people, but people are not always their organisations.

Recognising that distinction changes how a partnership professional listens. An organisation may have a formal objective, but the individual across the table can have a more specific reason for pursuing it. They may care deeply about an environmental outcome, need to protect a business case, lack authority to commit resources, or be trying to avoid a particular operational risk. Those personal and professional realities shape what they can contribute.

This human focus also requires consistency from the partnership professional. Sebastian argues that trust develops when behaviour repeatedly signals the values a person claims to hold. Someone who presents follow-through as a priority, for example, needs to respond, circulate agreed information, and complete the actions they accept. Misalignment between stated values and observable behaviour can quickly weaken a relationship.

The way that you build trust is by consistently signalling things through your behaviour.

For organisations, the implication reaches beyond individual courtesy. Institutional values become credible through the everyday conduct of the people managing partnerships. Responsiveness, openness, and reliability are therefore part of delivery, rather than softer qualities that sit outside the work.

Useful indicators reveal relationship movement

Trust is difficult to capture through a standard KPI. Measuring the number of days before a partner replies could produce data, but Sebastian cautions that this can become administratively burdensome and lose its purpose. The more useful question concerns how the other person engages and whether their behaviour indicates growing investment in the relationship.

Responsiveness is an early signal. A prompt reply can suggest interest or urgency, while a slow response may reflect limited value, an unclear request, or a genuinely busy period. The indicator does not provide a verdict on its own; it prompts the partnership professional to investigate what may be happening.

Other signals show deeper movement. Partners who ask questions are contributing to a two-way exchange. Those who explain what they want begin to expose their priorities. Sharing what they hope to avoid demands greater openness because it reveals pain points and vulnerability. Bringing a senior decision-maker into the discussion commits valuable time, while allocating staff, funding, or other resources demonstrates a stronger willingness to share risk despite uncertainty.

Sebastian frames these behaviours as levels on a trust staircase. Teams can move upwards as commitment deepens, but they can also slide back when expectations are missed or behaviour becomes inconsistent.

Trust is something you have to intentionally build.

The model gives partnership teams a vocabulary for relationship maturity without pretending that judgement can be replaced by an equation. Instead of reporting activity alone, they can discuss the evidence of engagement, what it may mean, and which action could support the next step.

Empathy uncovers value that formal agendas miss

Empathy becomes practical when partnership professionals ask what another person is trying to achieve, why it matters to them, and what constraints surround that ambition. This shifts attention from presenting a ready-made offer towards understanding where goals might genuinely align.

Sebastian saw the value of that approach while developing a consortium focused on sustainable data centres. One participating company had specialist knowledge in innovative cooling methods, but its role was initially small. As a start-up or scale-up, it also had limited capacity to commit further organisational resources.

Rather than accepting the formal boundary of the company’s involvement, Sebastian asked its chief technology officer what he personally wanted to achieve. The answer revealed an idea with significant potential to reduce carbon emissions, but one that was too risky for shareholders to approve through the company’s normal route. The consortium offered a setting in which that idea could be explored.

Connecting the project with the CTO’s underlying motivation changed the company’s participation. It became more engaged, expanded its contribution, and assumed a leadership role within the consortium. The additional commitment emerged because the partnership created a route to pursue something the individual genuinely valued.

This example also shows why empathy does not mean agreeing to every request. It helps teams locate mutual benefit within the resources, mandates, and risks each party brings. By understanding the person as well as the organisation, partnership professionals can identify possibilities that remain hidden when engagement is defined only through institutional objectives.

Shared risk conversations can strengthen a consortium

Multi-stakeholder collaborations add further complexity. Partners may work to different timelines, hold unequal decision-making power, and approach intellectual property, investment, and technical risk from different positions. Alignment depends partly on giving those concerns a legitimate place in the work.

Sebastian uses a pre-mortem to surface them early. Instead of reviewing why a project failed after it ends, partners imagine at the outset that the work has collapsed and ask what caused that outcome. The exercise counters the optimism that can shape planning and reveals which risks are most prominent for each participant.

Let’s imagine it’s six months from now, one year from now, and the project has died. Let’s say why, and you work backwards from that.

In a battery consortium developing large-scale systems connected to the electricity grid, multiple partners raised the rapid decline in the cost of energy technology and batteries in China. The consortium could not remove the challenge through one technical intervention. Discussing it still created value: members could explain how the issue affected their business cases, recognise a shared concern, and build a more open understanding of the conditions in which they were working.

A pre-mortem therefore supports trust even when it does not produce a complete mitigation plan. It makes space for partners to disclose fears, compare perspectives, and identify where they can respond together. Vulnerability becomes useful evidence for planning, while early discussion reduces the chance that known concerns remain unspoken until a crisis.

Frameworks should sharpen judgement, not freeze it

Sebastian’s stakeholder framework follows four broad actions: list and listen, understand, categorise, and engage. Teams first identify the specific people involved, including their roles, rather than recording organisations alone. They then consider each person’s interests, expectations, problems, motivations, mandates, and available resources.

Categorisation helps allocate attention. Mapping stakeholders by their interest in an initiative and their power to influence it can show where engagement needs to be deeper or differently designed. The trust staircase then supports intentional engagement, helping teams consider what evidence of commitment exists and what might enable the relationship to progress.

The framework remains provisional because every assessment contains assumptions. People gain authority, priorities change, and repeated conversations reveal where an initial judgement was incomplete. Documenting the assessment makes those assumptions visible and allows teams to revisit them rather than treating an early stakeholder map as permanent truth.

Always challenge your assumptions and your biases.

For Sebastian Husein, operationalising trust means combining structure with honest reflection. Partnership teams can observe meaningful behaviours, document what they think they understand, and use practical tools to surface motivation and risk. Their measures become valuable when they improve the quality of engagement and keep attention on the people whose choices ultimately determine whether collaboration gains traction.

Ready for more?

Strong partnerships are built through everyday interactions that create trust, align expectations, and strengthen collaboration over time. While frameworks and metrics can provide direction, meaningful partnerships ultimately depend on understanding people, motivations, and shared goals.

• Building strategic and sustainable university–industry partnerships explores how collaborations evolve from initial engagement to long-term strategic partnerships. The article highlights the role of trust, relationship-building, and mutual value creation in developing partnerships that can deliver lasting impact.
• Designing university–SME collaboration that actually works examines how universities can reduce friction, build confidence through early interactions, and create pathways that encourage repeat engagement. It offers practical insights into how trust develops through collaboration rather than through formal agreements alone.

These insights reinforce a key message from Sebastian Husein’s experience: successful partnerships are not built through transactions or reporting structures, but through consistent behaviours, shared understanding, and a willingness to invest in relationships over time.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!