Working Through the Hard Part of Partnerships

Internal authorities are the legal basis upon which you can enter into a partnership and, if so, what kind of partnerships you can enter into.  Understanding these core authorities will allow you to understand how and with whom you can partner to complete mutually agreed upon goals.

Each organization has its own culture.  The organizational culture will determine the likelihood that entering into a partnership will result in a meaningful outcome.  Not every organization has a culture that is conducive to partnerships, which is why it is important to assess and understanding your own internal culture before looking at developing new partnerships.

While your organization may have a culture that seems to be one that would embrace engaging in partnerships, the next limiting factor is understanding the way your organizational structure and resources can either enhance or hinder your ability to engage in a partnership.

While there are some organizational structure and resources that will determine an ability to be successful in the partnership, knowing the specific resources that are available for a specific partnership is critical.  Without having the right resources in the right place at the right time, it will be difficult to be an effective partner.

The final step of the organizational self assessment is to ensure that the right person is in the interface between the organization and the partners.  Having the right person can iron out many of the potential conflicts while having the wrong person in this position may create problems where there are none.

When you are thinking about becoming involved in a partnership, there are three kinds of partnerships that you are likely to face.  Each of these partnerships has their own nuances and understanding which kind of partnership is crucial to understand how the effort will feed into your larger ability to meet your vision and achieve your goals.

Before exploring how we can initiate partnerships with those outside of our organization, we want to understand our larger goals.  By defining and stating our goals as specifically as possible, we can better understand how we can achieve them and where and why a partnership effort may be useful.

Having clearly defined goals is critical to achieving your vision.  It is also important to have a clearly defined plan so that you now the process through which will need to achieve your goals.  An effective plan will allow you to better assess your resources as you identify each step in the process of achieving the desired goals.

Few organizations have the depth of capability to meet every component within a plan effectively.  Areas within the organization may have a weakness can be a barrier to completing the plan and achieving one's goals.  Identifying barriers can serve as the foundation for looking for outside partnerships to help overcome those capability gaps.

Understanding that our organizations may not have the effective capability to meet all the needs in our plan, identifying these barriers will allow us to seek outside help.  Therefore, it is important to clearly state the barriers and what will be specifically needed to overcome that barrier.

There are likely to be a variety of organizations and individuals outside of your organization who can fill barriers and help you achieve your goals.  Identifying all the potential partners within the larger system in which you are working ensures you are casting a broad net to explore potential partners.

Having been through several stages to assess one's capacity and identified areas in which a partnership can overcome an internal challenge, reviewing the process with other staff and individuals can test whether your ideas are valid and ready for primetime.

Within our organizations, we are going to have goals that we expect to achieve.  When someone approaches our organization to engage in a partnership, we want to make their request aligns with our goals.  In this lecture, we will learn how to assess the goals of an incoming partner and determine how much alignment we have between the goals of both organizations and the proposed goals within the partnership offer.

There will be times when an approaching partner brings up a proposal that does not clearly align with our goals.  While one should not reject these proposals out of hand, in this lecture, we will use some tools to determine if we want to explore the possibility of changing our goals to better reflect the environment in which we are operating.

Hopefully, an incoming partner has some kind of plan for achieving their proposal.  As we are considering the alignment between our organizations, we want to make sure that our plans are mostly in alignment.  In this lecture, we will assemble some tools for analyzing the plan of an incoming partner and determining if our two plans are largely in alignment or if there is enough inconsistency that a future partnership may be too difficult.

Every organization has a suite of capabilities in which they excel.  There are also areas in which they struggle or in which they lack capability.  In this lecture, we will explore how to evaluate our own capabilities in relation to those that are being brought forward by a potential partner.

Capacity is the amount of something that we can perform.  An incoming partnership request will likely require additional capacity.  Understanding your existing capacity can determine if you, your section, and your organization can manage the potential additional workload.

Having worked through a variety of tools for assessing the request from an external organization, this is a quick review of steps to see if we may want to continue considering entering into a partnership that comes in from the outside.

There are some special situations in which a third party provides resources to create a new partnership.  These third party partnerships present their own unique opportunities and challenges and this lecture will provide one with the tools to evaluate one of these efforts.

Having worked through the process of clarifying that we are aligned with potential partners on several fronts, we want to move onto the pre-work of actually exploring what engaging in a partnership will entail.  This lecture will work through the ideas of formalizing the partnership expectations prior to entering into any agreements.

While a partner may look good upon initial contact, it is always a good idea to do a little background work to ensure the partner is one that can follow through on their expectations.  As with hiring a new employee, a background check allows you to confirm there are no significant red flags that may arise within the implementation of a partnership arrangement.

The core of a partnership is identifying who is going to do what.  This will include the what, the when, and the how.  Having this conversation before the development of a formal agreement will allow each partner to clearly understand what is required before they sign their name and commit to a specific effort.

Having defined the roles and responsibilities of each partnership, the next phase is to clarify the expectations for how these roles will be carried out and the consequences for what may happen if a partner fails in their ability or willingness to carry out their expectations.

While much of the ground has been laid for the partnership, a tabletop exercise allows each member to explore how the partnership may function when it is actually implemented.  These kinds of exercises give each member the ability to find areas of weakness and allows for a final review of if this is a partnership that one really wants to enter into.

Agreements are the formal establishment of a partnership.  Understanding the different kinds of agreement is important to understand the strength of the agreement regarding roles and responsibilities and how likely it is to survive legal scrutiny.

Partnerships are likely to have specific legal language. While the language can be very technical, it is important to understand the details of the agreement so that you can stay in line with the expectations within the partnership.

We are finally at the stage of beginning work on the partnership.  Few partnerships are self-executing and one wants to consider specific steps during the execution phase to identify successes and challenges and find ways to effectively communicate among all those involved.

Having undergone the first round of our partnership effort, how did it go?  Evaluating the good, the bad, and the ugly of an execution phase can help determine if partnerships can be improved or if we may want to consider terminations.

While partnerships are a kind of relationship between organizations, it is useful to look at the partnership as a small component of a larger relationship rather than the end point of a relationship.