In 141 days, the new NFL season will kick off.

I can’t wait to see the fan outrage about how the league is rigged whenever the Kansas City Chiefs take the field.

It’s rather comical.

I’m also eager to see another sneaky sideline run by Patrick Mahomes. The guy literally skirts the boundaries of the field of play, daring defenders to come and hit him.

Defining the field of play is needed for any sport, but it’s also useful when elevating trust in a relationship.

Specifically, I’m talking about the relationship between a retailer/brand and a manufacturer.

If you recall from last week, we talked about how organizational structures shape thinking, attitudes and strategy.

From that, we threw questions onto the table including: “Why can we not trust a vendor to fit and approve a proto?”

For some, there might be a sense of panic in your chest when reading the suggestion that factories can be trusted to make specific decisions.

(Even the idea of approving a product without a physical sample has been known to cause a sweaty palm or two.)

But that’s precisely what building trust entails – letting go of some control and increasing dependence on the partner. The idea is to let go of some control, not take the hand off the wheel completely.

In case you needed a little incentive to let go just a bit: Research has shown a lack of trust is precisely what holds back retailer-manufacturer relationships from growing. Said research also shows that high-trust in these relationships drives unit-sales, revenues and profit – See Nirmalaya Kumar’s work in Harvard Business Review from 1996.

Partnering with a factory (or any party for that matter) needs to have defined boundaries.

Those boundaries define a field of play for the partnership. The factory partner has a sense of ownership within that defined space.

A simple diagram to showcase this would look like the following:

In the above, we are defining the field of play for a brand/factory partnership. We arbitrarily chose the identity of the four boundaries. Your situation will no doubt be completely different.

This is not to suggest that all vendors are candidates to be elevated in this manner. Some are best suited to strictly fulfilling an order on time, on spec and serve as a “commodity partner.” The main driver for working with such a vendor is cost.

Others might be candidates because they have the right skill set, people and organizational structure. Taking a leap of faith to put a defined level of trust and some dependence on the vendor will lead to a higher value relationship.

The boundaries can be expanded or contracted as the situation dictates.

The field can also be shut down entirely if needed.

Too bad fans can’t do that when their team (minus the Eagles) plays the Chiefs.