“Asking is
beginning of receiving. Make sure you don't go to ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so kids won't laugh at you.” Jim Rohn“You get best out of others when you give best of yourself.” Harvey Firestone
"Collaboration will be critical business competency of Internet Age. It won't be ability to fiercely compete, but ability to lovingly cooperate that will determine success. Rather than focusing on stomping competition into ground, true leaders of Internet Age will focus on creating value for their customers, intelligence and skill in their talent, and wealth for their investors and shareholders." James M. Kouzes
You would think that after years of being married, I would have realized that powerful business partnering requires same attention, perseverance, courage and skill as does personal partnering. However, it's taken me several years to understand and negotiate complex process of forming successful business partnerships.
Research from Harvard Center for Negotiation reveals that 70% of all strategic alliances fail because people don't know how to manage complex relationships which, of course, involve many difficult conversations. My colleagues, Peter Norlin and Judith Vogel, define partnership as “a successful relationship in service to a specific task...this collaboration requires creation of a special interpersonal connection, [and entails] putting relationship to work.”
In any collaborative endeavor, there are two streams of activity occurring concurrently. What's visible - above water line - is focus on goals and task accomplishment. This is typically where people focus because it's easier - usually less personal, less threatening, and it's what we're used to doing.
However, it's invisible stream below water line that is equally if not more important. This is stream of interpersonal interaction and process ever present in a group of two or more, which often goes unaddressed because many people have less practice and ease in this domain.
Yet successful partnerships require self-awareness, discipline and intention in “working” relational issues. Below water line, there are two foundational elements that must be explored and discussed if you want to create high-performance formal partnerships - self as it relates to other(s), and identity of partnership as an entity.
The latter involves clarifying business vision, values, guiding principles and purpose for business which I'll address at another time.
Working relationship depends on being able to effectively communicate about one's self to other, and depends on several critical abilities of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, transparency, and influence.
In Norlin-Vogel partnership model, people forming partnerships start to pay attention to three deeply significant qualities in other person. These are status, motive, and competence of “other.”
