Photo Credit : Michael Tienzo’s
Smart Partnering: It is all about DIALOG, GIVING and PATIENCE
You can only do so much alone. Your network is your accelerator for growth. Smart partnerships is a key differentiator and very hard to replicate easily.
Petri Salonen, CEO of Tellus Corporation clearly articulates that “Partnering is mostly misunderstood among businesspeople. Impatience for getting quick results and lack of commitment to building joint success will lead to a relationship that will not go anywhere. Partnering requires patience, and partnering is not about getting, it is about giving.”
That’s right. Smart partnering is all about DIALOG, GIVING and PATIENCE. If done well it provides incredible ways to differentiate your offering and unleash new ways to win the opportunities to grow your business.
Smart partnering is all about art and science. It starts with understanding each other’s value system. If your business cannot connect at the business philosophy level you will not be successful in sustaining your partnerships for long time.
Being in the partnering business for a long time, what I have seen is that smart partnership happens at 3 levels. They are foundational blocks to build and sustain the relationships. The 3 layers are:
- VALUE ALIGNMENT – Smart partnerships are aligned at their core values. They believe in it, nurture it and drive alignment.
- CLEAR GOALS – Smart partnerships are built on clear goals and aspirations. They work together to achieve their goals. They dedicate money, resources, network, contacts or knowledge to make it happen. They are committed to each other.
- COMPLEMENTING EACH OTHER – Smart partnership is about complementing each other. Both the parties are very well aware of their strengths and weaknesses. They complement each other at all levels and believe in competing together to win.
Finding right partners is easy. You can find them easily through your friends, your work, your network and your mentors. What makes smart partnership is work is when you engage with the spirit of giving to build and nurture the relationships. When I talk about spirit of giving it is all about sharing knowledge, resources, money, contacts or network. Whatever it takes to make it successful. It is about commitment.
When engaging in partnership, I use a simple mental model to build and nurture relationships. Personally, feeling comfortable is very important.
- Start from the trust zone: Usually, when I engage they are referred by someone who is close to me. I also do research before jumping into building relationship. It is all about how comfortable I feel.
- Invest to know them – I believe in investing time upfront to understand them, know their values, their challenges and their goals. I look for common connection points to feel comfortable.
- Build common vision– This is when rubber meets the road. When I engage in building common vision, I get to know them closely in all aspects: emotional, spiritual, strategic, innovation and many more. Again able to feel comfortable.
- Create shared commitments – Most of the partnerships fail at common visioning. If they survive, building in shared commitments is an important activity. This helps you build engagement plan or business plan. This requires lot of time on conversations to become crystal clear. It is worth the time spent. I used the IAMCP partnering maturity model to build committments across 10 focus areas.
- Give generously- I thinking giving is all about mindset. You have or you don’t. When you give generously, you will see the difference. It really helps you thrive and achieve ambitious goals.
If you are struggling in building smart partnerships, try few of my ideas. Start today by having a dialog, a spirit of giving and lot of patience.
Share your thoughts about how you nuture your partnerships?
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While successful partnering does require patience, it is much easier to be patient with others when you are motivated by a common goal and agree on what each person will do to achieve it.
Smart partnering starts with a sweet spot of mutual benefit that motivates all parties to participate, then requires agreement on the top, actionable goal, the specific rules of engagement and to responsibilities of all partners. With those in place even people who may not share all the same values will find it easier to work well together towards achieving that goal. Also, with these elements in place it is more likely that partners bring out the better side (temperament + talent) in each other and perform at their best. That experience usually leads to camaraderie and increased closeness. As a former WSj reporter who has forged 43 smartpartnerships for clients and for my business I’ve found that these specific concrete steps enable even those who think they have little in common accomplish greater things together than they could alone. This experience has motivated me to write about others’ collaborative methods, mishaps, success stories and what-if scenarios at HowWePartner and at MovingFromMetoWe
Hi Kare, Thanks for sharing your insights. Smart partnerships is about moving from “ME” to “WE”. When you worked on forging 43 smart partnerships for your business, do you have collaborative methods and stories that I can read. I am always looks for new ways to increase effectiveness in partnerships.
I’d have to say that after 25 years in business partnering is still one of those things people will inherently have good, bad and sometiems ugly “mishaps” with. Perhaps Petri’s more indepth scenario is like dating. Get to know the parnter as deep down as you can especially if this is in a secnario where its a customer that’s your first and especially a long time one.
Thanks Elisabeth. Your coaching on building smart partnerships has always resulted in significant benefits. You are truly inspirational.
Chaitra, excellent high level overview – thanks for sharing, and congrats on your new book!
I’m interested in your thoughts on some more details on executive participation and sponsorship on both sides, strategic alignment and IP sharing issues.
Thanks,
Raj
Hi Raj,
Take a look at the Partnering Maturity model (http://www.slideshare.net/cvedulla/partnering-maturity-model-3110185). This provides a framework to engage executives at a strategic partnership level. Call me if you need me to step you through the model. I have used it many times and it works like a charm.