“A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” Alvy Singer[1] could just as well have been talking about partnerships. Partnerships have to evolve and develop and if they don’t, they just fade away into irrelevance, taking with them a lot of hopes and wasted investment.

So how can a dying shark relationship be brought back to health to continue its work? Obviously the most important thing is to get the patient off the (sea)bed and moving again – but how do you do this?

Like any lasting relationship there needs to be some vision of a shared future, not just a shared present; something to aim for that ideally brings hope and joy and lifts the soul away from the humdrum of everyday. In short, we need a shared dream.

Dreams come in small and large sizes but they must be motivating; and to be super-attractive they should be distinctive and unique. These are what we call ‘signature programmes’ and when we develop them with our clients they are easy to spot – by the fizz of excitement in the room. A key rule of selling dreams is that you too have to find them exciting, and help others to do so too.

But like relationships, it is also possible to revive partnerships by starting with a good bit of listening – something that is all too often forgotten. Assumptions and expectations can build up until they become quite divorced from reality, and we may feel that we are still listening when in fact we are just going through the motions. Things are left unsaid to avoid causing upset – and by not being addressed become more toxic.

Sometimes, as in relationship counselling in our personal lives, it takes an outsider to identify where it all started to go wrong – and to help us to put it right. For Powering Partnerships this means finding out what your partners wouldn’t want to say to your face, but is still really important; or probing a bit deeper to see how circumstances have changed and so how the focus of the partnership needs to change, or perhaps even be wound down, saving wasted effort and misunderstanding down the line.

Best of all we get to frame these impressions and feed them back to our clients, along with recommendations of how they could adapt their behaviour to breathe new life into those relationships – and start new ones on a fresher and more productive footing.

As in human relationships, showing that you have listened, and acted on what you have heard, can soften the hardest hearts and revive partnerships that could otherwise be written off.

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If you would like to find out more about how we can help to revive your partnerships and start great new ones, do get in touch

[1] Alvy Singer was the hero in Annie Hall, a 1978 film which won four Oscars and had some of the most famous lines in romantic comedy.

The post How to Revive Partnerships appeared first on Powering Partnerships.

When Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations said, ‘When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies and civil society work hand-in-hand, we can achieve great things’, he was telling a great truth. . He was perhaps also glossing over the huge amount of work that setting up and developing these partnerships involves.

Our experience is that clients who have many ‘partnerships’, often spread around the globe, can find their days drained of purpose by administration to keep them going, responding to partners’ (sometimes not very important) requests and trying to get less biddable ones to deliver. This leaves little room for thinking big, identifying the relationships that can help that transformation, and still less for making change happen.

So that’s where partnership typology comes in as a way of separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff etc (add metaphor of your choice). In fact it’s a bit cleverer than that as it typically uses a bespoke matrix to separate partners into types according to the type of relationship and the assistance that they can deliver.

This classification requires both research into the nature of the relationships and clear thinking. Examining the relationships often reveals truths that had been forgotten or never really appreciated. Typically a number of relationships aren’t equal ‘partnerships’ at all, they are more or less transactional. Academic institutions and professional bodies, for example, may be funded for some development work or contribute to an impressive paper. Part of this service may be to have their name and logo associated with the material – and so ‘partnership’ is a much more acceptable public face of the relationship for both sides. In reality though, the relationship is essentially commercial – they provide a service in return for money.

All sorts of other groups from civil society groups to for-profits who are contracted to provide a service come under the same umbrella. These relationships often evolve organically rather than as part of a detailed plan, and so are governed by a range of agreements, contracts and MOUs and treated in a variety of ways. By using a partnership typology to group them together administration can be simplified, and as far as possible automated so that precious thinking and development time is not wasted in areas where there is very limited potential.

Other groups may be ‘critical friends’, or even just ‘friends’, who have helped the project along without payment. This is not always their preferred financial relationship. When we pointed out that a ‘friend’ of one of our clients had been helping them for years in the hope of eventually getting paid in some way they quickly arranged a payment – making their friend even happier and more cooperative.

At the other end of the spectrum are the partners that require nurturing to deliver to their very real development potential. At first pass some of these groups or individuals are far from obvious, but that can be because not enough time was available to work with them to explore how they can help, and indeed why they should.

Thinking time released by simplifying the management of the more contractual relationships can be used to explore opportunities with these few key partners, work on joint solutions and genuinely pool resources.

The result of the partnership typology is a much more productive way of working in which creative and relationship-building skills are put to best use; cooperation is developed more quickly and productively; and the team responsible for the work put firmly back in the driving seat.
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If you would like to find out more about how to manage your partners better, do get in touch

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