Partnering and Collaboration
Large and complex initiatives and projects often require the participation of different organizations or stakeholders who may have diverse and competing interests. People who have never worked with each other may be thrown together, chosen for their subject matter expertise in a variety of disciplines. Their communication styles, personalities, and agendas may or may not be compatible. Yet they are mutually interdependent and accountable for the success of one or more initiatives.
When likeability and compatibility are not qualifying criteria, can people with competing agendas succeed as a team?
The answer lies in successful partnering and collaboration, the single premise of which is that all participants have a common end-goal for which they share collective responsibility.
As an objective and neutral partner, not biased by internal politics, we work with the Executive sponsor and their chosen team, first one-on-one, then as a group, to build a framework for the desired working relationship. Successful partnering and collaboration involves helping stakeholders adapt to differing work and communication styles, and using individual and group conflict constructively.This creates a culture of joint problem solving in multi-discipline and multi-entity teams.
As a result of our Partnering and Collaboration engagements, clients are able to:
- redefine traditional adversarial relationships by identifying common goals and committing to collectively achieve them
- derive value from new and ongoing relationships
- organize a structure for ongoing conversation to tackle problems
- develop clarity around expectations of each other, and how responsibility and accountability will be shared
- align competing interests
Partnering accelerates the process of teams becoming collaborative and delivering results. It is beneficial for new as well as ongoing initiatives and projects.