I’m taking a quick break from my series on artificial intelligence and writing as I had a great experience recently that I wanted to translate into a blog post. In particular I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the annual Nutrition Links conference. The theme for the conference was partnership and as someone who loves to talk about leadership, I made the connection between leadership and partnership. The below blog entry is a translation of that speech into a readable format.
What is leadership?
What we often think of when we envision leadership isn’t leadership. It’s leaders. People will talk about specific leaders in their lives or famous people. Someone standing out in front of a group. But those leaders don’t lead without a lot of other things that go along with them. So, let’s look at these ideas.
“Leadership is ‘a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.’” (Northouse, 2016, p. 3)
Bolding is mine, not in the original.
As you can see there is a component of leadership that is about the individual leader. But there are some other key components to leadership.
- Group/Followers. We can’t have leaders if there is no one willing to follow them. There is a lot to unpack there, there are ideas like power, relationships, motivation, decision making, and a whole lot of other social dynamics.
- Process. This is the part of leadership that is truly overlooked. Leadership is an ongoing process; it doesn’t just happen once. You don’t just put a leader in place and leadership happens. Leadership must continually move as the situation changes and it must adapt. The leader and the followers must continue to participate in working towards the common goal for leadership to continue to exist.
- Common goal. Leadership requires a direction. If people are just hanging out and not working towards something, leadership is not happening.
In other words, leadership is a living thing that needs fed and taken care of.
Leadership is more like this; people facing each other and interacting with one another to get the job done. If you think about famous CEOs or presidents, they may often appear like they are out in front, but the reality is that they are just a member of a leadership team. CEOs have CHROs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs, and so on that they meet with regularly and they decide on the way forward together. They all then must convince their followers to move in that direction as well. Presidents do the same thing with their presidential cabinets and other advisors. They then must use the media to get their messages across and convince the public that their group decision is the path forward. Again, real leadership involves people and reacting in real-time to build a better future.
What is Partnership?
The next question we need to ask ourselves if we are going to connect leadership and partnership is: what is partnership?
Good partnership happens at the individual and group level.
“(A) partnership is a collaboration among business, non-profit organizations, and government in which risks, resources and skills are shared in projects that benefit each partner as well as the community” (Stratton, 1989).
Bolding and italics are mine, not in the original.
Similar to the definition of leadership, there are several key components to this definition of partnership.
- Collaboration. In other words, there must be some sort of relationship between the constituencies.
- Mutual benefit. That relationship must lead to something positive for those involved. The community and the partners gain something from the relationship.
- Sharing. Both risks and rewards.
Here are two quick examples.
Ford partnering with Mazda for over 40 years to bring success to both companies across national and company boundaries. Both companies save money, which increases their profits, which allows them to contribute more taxes to the individual countries. Risks, being tied to one another so if one fails, the other fails.
Doctors without Borders partnering with local governments to provide healthcare where it may not have existed previously. This one is a bit less obvious; non-profits usually are. But what are the benefits for both sides: Governments get healthcare for their citizens, young doctors get experience to build a reputation, other doctors get to repay society that may have sponsored their education. Risks: less experienced doctors, going into places that may have disease outbreaks.
Partnership is Leadership
Again, leadership relies on a lot of social processes to achieve its goals. And partnership is one of the main social processes to help in that relationships domain.
I can think of lots of times I’ve been in leadership roles and had to form partnerships to achieve my goals. When I first started in my career as an online instructor, there were a lot of student services that didn’t exist yet for online students. I had to form partnerships with the library, student affairs, advising, the bookstore, and a whole host of other organizations so that I could lead students towards their end goal of achieving a meaningful degree for themselves. Those partnerships were how I achieved leadership in online education with a goal of improving online student education.
So how did I do this? First, thing is that I had to reach out to people. Sometimes I would just cold call, typically with something along the lines of “I heard you do this, and I’d like to learn more”. Here’s a real secret to life: People really like to talk about themselves and what they do, so this is a good ice breaker. Then I’d meet with them and listen. Which is another secret to life. Truly listening. People often want to be heard and listening to them goes a long way to creating a lasting relationship.
Active listening can make a huge difference.
Active listening is listening to people without developing a response to what they are saying until they are done. Recapping what they said to make sure that you understood. “What I’m hearing you are saying is…” Then responding based on what they said in full.
Then based on the conversation, I might pitch whatever it was I wanted to accomplish or decide that we needed another meeting if seemed like there was not enough trust or rapport yet. Gauging people is really important as you don’t want to come off as too transactional or only serving your own needs. Remember, partnerships are about meaningful benefit for all involved. So, you have to help the other side see how what you are doing well benefit them.
The key thing to remember is that these relationships are going to be long lasting; I still have partnerships with people I worked with 15 years ago or more because we established solid partnerships from the get-go. You must treat them as a valuable commodity. Any good relationship, such as a strong partnership, is something that needs to be worked on constantly.
Creating Partnerships
I’m guessing that many of you are reading this blog today though because you want to learn about forming effective partnerships beyond anecdotal stories. And thankfully, there are lots of social scientists out there that study these things.
So here I’m sharing a model of how to create partnerships from Ronald McQuaid who has several decades of studying the notion of partnerships and I’m going to share his model here.
He boils it down to five major questions to ask when creating a partnership (McQuaid). These are a spin on the basic five questions, that a reporter asks for a news story and you may remember from grade school report writing, which is why I like this model. It’s easy to remember. The idea is that you are really getting to know what is your purpose and how to achieve it.
- What is the partnership seeking to do?
In other words, you must establish the purpose or goal for the partnership to work towards. This will require asking questions of your potential partners to gauge what they would like. This allows you to build both a common goal (leadership) as well as mutual benefit (partnership). And again, truly listening to what they want.
- Who is involved?
You must establish specifically who will be involved and why they will be involved. Any good partnership has some sort of boundary conditions. In business, these are determined by contracts, who specifically will be involved and who will they work with. But the same is true for non-profits. While you may not have a contract, establishing who exactly will be primary contacts and what they will do is a good idea.
- When?
Will this be an ongoing project, or will it be time limited? But even if it is time limited, the relationships need to be built. Those time limited ones can be tricky as you may have limited time to build relationships. But it will pay off. Because even time limited partnerships can come back to help you later. I know that a lot of those partnerships I was talking about from early in my career are still paying off today when we go to start a new partnership. Some partnerships are time limited. Like with my clients, we set very specific dates to fulfill the contract. But at the same time, the partnership extends beyond the contract, which is how the relationship extends if needed. Or if you need expertise in the future, you can return to interacting with your partners.
- Where or whom?
This one seems straight forward, where and/or with whom will the work be performed. But in today’s world of remote work, it is worth establishing this upfront and what the expectations will be. Again, like “who is involved” you might put this in a contract or just establish it verbally at the get go.
- How? Implementation mechanisms.
What tools will be used. For example, if it is a virtual partnership, will you be using Zoom or Teams? If you are in person, will you need access to certain tools on site?
These five questions serve the purpose of clarifying exactly what you want to do by establishing the scope of the partnership project.
A really common leadership mistake is to allow for scope creep. Scope creep is when a project keeps adding things, and eventually detracts from the original vision and mission. That is why good leaders establish very clear ground rules in any partnership early in the process by using some sort of formula such as this one.
Maintaining Partnerships
I’ve already hinted at this, but good partnerships never really die. They live on. You never want to burn a bridge when it comes to a partnership. As the network you form will serve you throughout your career as a leader.
Having successful partnerships in your network, allows you to build more partnerships faster and easier in the future. If I am starting a new project and I know one person who knows one person who knows one person, we can build a new project fast. I’ve had a lot of what seemed like complex projects launch very quickly recently because I had previous partnerships to rely on. For example, a while back I launched a leadership assessment center with some colleagues. That type of project would typically take a year or more to launch, but we launched in roughly 4-6 months because I already had people in my network who I could form partnerships with quickly to get the job done.
But a lot of the maintenance comes from just being a good person and checking in with people. What I do to maintain these relationships, is make a concerted effort to show up in people’s lives. I drop in at the office when I have a meeting, but then make sure to say hi and check in on people’s lives in conversations outside of the meeting. I stop by my old department and walk the halls and talk to people I haven’t seen in a long time and do the same. I make sure that I check in with LinkedIn regularly so that I know what is going on with people and congratulate them on promotions and other successes.
Leading from your partnerships
So to kind of bring everything together today on how to lead from your partnership here is a really condensed version of what I discussed above.
- Reach out to others to start a relationship
- Find a mutual interest
- Ask the five questions
- Do the work
- Maintain the relationship through your network
- Rinse and repeat
Don’t be afraid to reach out to people. If you can have someone introduce you, that’s great, but cold calling can work if you focus on the other person and don’t just jump into a pitch.
Find that mutual interest and then go through the five questions (or quite frankly any boundary setting formula that works for you to establish the scope of the project) to help you establish your purpose and the workflow.
Do the work. And I don’t think I emphasized this enough. Good partnerships and relationships in general are much easier when you can do a good job. So sometimes that means putting in some extra effort on the first project with a new partner to make sure it goes off as smoothly as possible. The end result is that the partnership lasts longer and that it can be resurrected later on easily.
Maintain your partnership network. It will help you throughout your career, even if you switch jobs or even industries.
References
McQuaid, R.W. (2000) “The Theory of Partnerships – Why have Partnerships”, in: S.P. Osborne (ed.), Managing public-private partnerships for public services: an international perspective (Routledge, London) pp. 9-35.
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: Sage.
Stratton, C. (1989). Quoted in: OECD, Mechanisms for Job Creation. Paris and Askew (1991) OECD, p. 81.
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