All successful partnerships have three attributes in common:
- They are based on trust
- They are mutually beneficial
- They thrive in an interdependent atmosphere
These three attributes are even more crucial today. This is because the number of partnerships and alliances are multiplying exponentially. Partnerships within or outside of your business are growing, living organisms. And like all living creatures, their survival and success depends a lot on the atmosphere they find themselves in.
All cultures start with the individual, but it is the collection of individuals and how they interact that results in what we call “culture.”
As obvious as that may sound, a partnering culture has a profound impact on the ultimate success of your business. The norms of behavior create boundaries around what you can and cannot do and what’s acceptable and unacceptable in your business. It determines the direction of your human energy, the most powerful energy source any organization has.
Partnering Attributes. The first step in building a partnering culture needs to be taken by the executive leadership. They must move beyond intellectually understanding partnering behaviors into living partnering behaviors. Partnering behaviors are a set of actions that build trust and inspire a sense of vision and confidence in others. We call these six interrelated behaviors the Six Partnering Attributes. When used consistently within the organization, these attributes create the atmosphere that allows the partnering culture to thrive.
To accomplish this, the executives on the team must purposefully decide they are going to behave in an open and trusting manner using the interpersonal skills described in the Six Partnering Attributes and commit to doing so. Then they must hold each other accountable for engaging in the behaviors to which they’ve agreed.
Communication and Collaboration. In addition to helping leadership set good examples, the Six Partnering Attributes help create a language that enables team members to better communicate with each other. Through meaningful dialogue, language is bonded to action. When language and action form a bond, trust is built, sending positive charges through the atmosphere and energizing the culture.
Consequently, when people in a partnering culture talk about working collaboratively and building trust, each member knows what actions he or she must take to meet everyone else’s expectations. Over time, these become behavioral norms that are embedded within the organizational culture itself.
Building a Partnering Infrastructure. The second step in building a partnering culture is to be sure the organization’s infrastructure supports the emerging culture. When the compensation structure, for example, is contradictory to expected behavior, people will do what they are rewarded to do. If you want collaborative behavior, you must balance the reward for both collaborative behavior and individual contribution. If you value trust, you must measure trust and reward it. It’s not difficult, but few organizations have such measurements in place.
Six Partnering Attributes | ||||||
Our Six Partnering Attributes are a behavior-based system that results in an environment conducive to building trust and creating mutual beneficial relationships. One must be fluid in all six attributes in order to reap the benefits of trusting business relationships, since the six attributes build on and reinforce each other.
The Six Partnering Attributes make up your Partnering Intelligence and are the foundation of building a partnering atmosphere, or Partnering Culture, within an organization. The six attributes include:
SELF-DISCLOSURE AND FEEDBACK Communication is the life-blood of any organization. Communication is critical to healthy relationships, and how we communicate is just as important as what we say. The ability to disclose relevant information, share personal and business experiences, and provide honest, direct and timely feedback is critical to closing the communication loop. Self-disclosure and feedback are foundation skills that not only energize organizational life but build trust in the process.
WIN/WIN ORIENTATION Getting to the win builds trust and frees-up communication. We are all hardwired to react to disagreements based on both our DNA and our early conditioning. This stimulus is predicated on the fact that we want to protect ourselves from threats. As with all living beings, our instinctual options are fight or flight. However, we can move away from our inherent style to one based on reason, needs, and communication through the use of the Negotiator style. To do this successfully, we must recognize our own inherent style and during times of emotional duress move to the learned style. Only then can we build trust with others and not create losers in the process.
ABILITY TO TRUST Trust is the foundation of all relationships. Without trust, there is no communication. Without trust there is no win/win. Trust is the basis for all healthy and productive relationships. It is also the key to enabling others and yourself to use the Six Partnering Attributes effectively. Without trust, you cannot have creativity, innovation or risk-taking; and employee loyalty goes right out the door, resulting in higher retention cost and poor morale. Trust is the only partnering attribute that is both an input into the relationship as well as an outcome of its use. Read about the 10 C’s of Trust
FUTURE ORIENTATION Do you ever hear these kinds of comments in your workplace? If so, perhaps your organization is infected with a past orientation. Leaders, employees, and organizations that continue to look to the past to make future decisions will find themselves mired in the past. Whether we are talking about business processes, systems, or each other, past orientation tends to demoralize people and can create a negative pall over an entire organization. This is especially true when leadership, managers, or supervisors embrace a past orientation. Looking to the future, establishing needs, and then holding each other accountable for the negotiated results are the hallmarks of a future-oriented organization. How well does your business do? Read our article about Future Orientation versus past orientation occurring in one of the world’s leading companies.
Change is constant and will not go away. If anything, it will only accelerate over time. Initiating too much change is as deadly to a business as resisting change. What’s the right balance? Understanding your change style, your change resistors and having strategies in place to manage change is a key to building trust with others and getting new and innovative opportunities to the workplace.
COMFORT WITH INTERDEPENDENCE Finding the balance between teamwork and individual contribution can be difficult, especially in today’s complex organizational life where no one person, department, or organization has all the solutions. Do your employees feel a duty to help each other’s success? Internal partners, people who work together within an organization, form the most important partnerships a business can have. Getting them to not only work together well but to have a duty to help each other’s success is a rare event in businesses around the world. Comfort with interdependence helps conceptualize how we can be independent enough to contribute our own talents to the team and dependent enough to trust others to do their part in the process. It’s a tough balance but, when it occurs, the magic of synergy happens. |