Ask someone what makes a partnership work, and you’ll often hear about chemistry — the sense that the right people and the right organisations happened to find each other and simply ‘clicked’. That’s a lovely thought, but it doesn’t seem much help if you’re trying to build a collaboration from scratch and don’t know where to start. Chemistry alone can’t be planned or budgeted for and is sometimes hard to repair when it breaks.
It’s absolutely true that some partnerships start with a ‘meeting of minds’ — visionaries might provide the energy to attract funding and excite a team. What’s most important, though, is making sure the partnership is built on a stronger foundation than just that initial energy.
At TPI, we describe these foundations as the Building Blocks of effective partnership: fundamentals, the partnership relationship, structure and set-up, and management and leadership. We like to think of these Building Blocks not as a checklist to complete in sequence, but as a set of lenses to keep returning to across the life of the partnership. When you build a house, it needs ongoing attention to make sure everything works — that the roof is sturdy, the water is running, the drainage is working, and the electricity turns on. Similarly, a partnership requires investment in the fundamentals, with regular check ins to make sure that the health of the partnership is maintained. It’s always easier, and cheaper, to fix something early before problems compound and cause further damage.
Building Block 1: Fundamentals
The first Building Block is about honesty: being up front about why a partnership exists or should exist. For a partnership to be worthwhile, three things must be true. There has to be clear added value from working together, genuine alignment of interests around a shared vision, and enough compatibility of values for partners to build trust with each other. The bottom line is simple: a partnership must be able to create significant value, and the right partners have to be around the table. Get the fundamentals wrong, and no amount of good management later will rescue the collaboration.
Building Block 2: The partnership relationship
If the fundamentals are the foundations on which a partnership stands, the relationship is what carries the partnership through everything that follows. Strong, trust-based relationships allow partners to go the extra mile and deliver results that look, from the outside, like chemistry.
Four elements sit at the heart of this:
- trust and transparency, built slowly through consistent, open behaviour — and on the other hand, easily lost through opacity;
- power balance and equity, because partnerships almost always bring together organisations of very different size, wealth and influence, and it’s important to recognise what each partner brings — and that all partners’ voices are heard;
- mutual benefit, the principle that every partner must gain from their involvement — not at each other’s expense, but through and because of the partnership;
- accountability, the shared commitment that partners will do what they said they would.
Building Block 3: Structure and set up
Every partnership needs a structure: the governance, management, operational and reporting arrangements that help get things done. There’s no one-size-fits-all here — a community-level collaboration and a global alliance need very different scaffolding. What’s important is asking, ‘is the structure and set-up fit for purpose?’
The structure and set-up include:
- legal and financial arrangements;
- the governance, management and operational structures that determine who decides what;
- the partnership documentation, from an MoU through to a full partnering agreement that captures what partners have agreed;
- clear objectives and agreed measures of success;
- the funding and resourcing needed to keep it running.
This doesn’t have to be perfect from the get-go, but it’s important to be intentional about the structure, rather than letting it form by default — or realising there isn’t one when something goes wrong!
Building Block 4: Management and leadership
The final Building Block is often the most underestimated. Managing a partnership goes well beyond conventional project management, because it involves coordinating whole organisations, sometimes without an obvious overarching line of management.
This Building Block needs three things:
- collective leadership, distributed across the partnership rather than concentrated in one organisation;
- project and relationship management, running the practical delivery and tending the relationships that make delivery possible;
- monitoring, review and iteration, checking progress, taking the health of the partnership seriously (maybe subjecting it to a partnership health check!), and making the changes needed to keep it on track.
At TPI, we know that good management is invaluable in supporting a partnership relationship, but the absence of good management can certainly undermine one.
Building and rebuilding
These four Building Blocks — fundamentals, relationship, structure, and management and leadership — are not four boxes to tick and forget. They are for looking at a partnership at any moment in its life and asking: which part needs attention right now?
A partnership that felt solid a year ago may have lost trust after a difficult decision, or outgrown a structure that once fit it well. That’s normal. What matters is returning to the Building Blocks deliberately, rather than only when something breaks. Put a date in the diary — once or twice a year — to sit down with your partners and ask which of the four needs attention. That habit, far more than any initial spark, is what keeps the house standing.
This piece draws on the Building Blocks of effective partnerships set out in TPI and UN DESA’s SDG Partnership Guidebook.
