In the business and coaching world, there is a lot of talk about partnering with a client, a business associate, or with other colleagues… but what does it mean exactly? We all want great partnerships; however, some succeed and some fail. Why? Let us dig into this concept.
The main component of a good partnership is balance between the parties involved; all need to feel that they are EQUALLY valued and important.
Anne is a financial director who is fully engaged in her job. To reach her objectives she needs to partner with each business branch’s manager in her company. However, Anne is getting frustrated as these managers do not seem to want to collaborate. As a result, she handles some tasks that the business managers should have done themselves. This has a great impact on her workload and creates a lot of frustration as she cannot focus on other missions included in her job description.
Here the partnership does not work on both sides:
- Anne is taking on tasks she should not be doing
- Her business partners are comfortable letting her handle these tasks and do not learn to do their job correctly
To re-balance the partnership, Anne understood that instead of rushing to finish up the managers’ tasks, she should hold them accountable. Using coaching techniques, she began to defer these duties to her colleagues in a courteous but firm manner. At first, the managers were reluctant to change their way of working. Anne decided to switch to a more descriptive approach by explaining them what to do. They started taking on more workload which allowed Anne to turn to some of her other tasks. Even more important, Anne’s self-esteem and engagement soared.
To have well-balanced partnerships, ask yourself:
- Are you focusing on your role or are you also doing someone else’s job?
- Do you feel frustrated because the partnership is not well-balanced?
- If this is the case, how could you start a conversation to re-balance this partnership in a way that is not abrupt but still firm and professional?
- How could you put in place some actions that work for all parties involved (included you)?
The second component of successful partnerships is TRUST. In coaching we say that there are three kinds of trusts:
- Trust in yourself
- Trust in others
- Trust in the process
Trusting yourself is easier said than done. It entails clearly knowing and accepting your strengths (your “bright” side) and weaknesses (your “dark” side). This means understanding they exist and that they will probably have an impact on your behaviors. Many of my coachees are quite shy when it comes to describing their strengths and think that everybody has them. Instead of adopting this mentality, consider admitting to yourself that you have something special. This awareness will make you value this special gift and automatically make it shine.
As per your dark side, saying: “I know that I am not good at it, but I have always been like this” shows that you do not really trust yourself to do something about it. What if instead you reframed this sentence and said: “I know that I have this tendency and I want to pay attention to situations where it comes out to better understand my triggers with the intention of doing better next time.”
Fully trusting who you are and allowing yourself to be your own partner is how you create better partnerships in general.
Trusting others can be difficult. To make this task less daunting, we can distinguish two kinds of people: the ones you no longer trust because of big disagreements or negative actions, and the ones you never gave a chance to prove how trustworthy they are.
In Anne’s case, she was always handling the business’ financials for her partners and never gave them the possibility to learn their part of the job, which led Anne to have to constantly correct their work. When she firmly let them know that they needed to do their part, she knew that it was not going to be perfect right away. She took the time to teach them, and above all, she started trusting that they could do a good job.
Think of your personal relationships, do you think your child is capable of cleaning their room by themselves? Do you have the patience to wait until they are done? On the professional side, do you give your collaborator the time to learn their tasks? Do you follow up with them to make sure that they are progressively coming up to speed?
Let us be honest, sometimes our impatience or anxiety comes into play and hinders our capability to trust others.
Finally, trust the process. To do so, you need to have a partnership process, with rules and boundaries. I am coaching a team where everybody complains that they do not collaborate with one another. When assessing the team, I discovered that they did not have a process in place to establish when and how they needed to collaborate, meaning they improvised in terms of partnerships for each one of their projects. But partnerships do not work that way. First, because in a team each party needs to have clear ideas about their roles and responsibilities, and second because each party needs to be held accountable about what they are doing.
Think of your partnership, did you clarify what rules you were going to follow, the “why” you are partnering, and how you need to work together?
Partnerships are not a given. They do not happen simply because you decided to partner with someone. To succeed you need to clearly know yourself, who you are and what you can and cannot do, know others and understand the relationship you want to have with them.
In a partnership, both parties are equally accountable for each other’s growth and performance. You need to care about your partner(s) learning process and success as if it were your own. As goals are shared, to have success means that each partner, including as yourself, is successful. It is a common achievement.
