So, you’re thinking of starting a partnership.
Perhaps there’s a shared frustration with the status quo, or your organisations are complementary, or you share a vision with others and can see an opportunity to bring people together.
There are many great reasons to partner, but you shouldn’t rush in. The truth is that many partnerships, even when they start out with the best intentions, fail or underperform. When they do, the costs to partners can be high – in credibility, relationships, time, morale and money. An underprepared partnership can be worse than no partnership at all.
Start with the basics
For a partnership to succeed, three things need to be true at once:
- Your interests need to be aligned with your partners’;
- You need a shared vision;
- And the benefits need to justify the time and effort you’ll all put in;
If you have those three things in place, you’re off to a good start. But partnering shouldn’t be your default option. Before you commit, it’s worth taking a step back and asking: what’s already been tried? Why is a partnership the right model? Have similar partnerships worked in similar contexts? Are there willing, capable partners available? And will the partnership create genuine added value?
To partner…?
From our years of working with partnerships at TPI, we’ve seen that the most successful ones tend to share a few conditions.
- There’s a clear reason to partner: you should be able to say why you need to work collaboratively, rather than through a contract.
- Everyone contributes and everyone benefits: each partner brings resources the partnership couldn’t succeed without, and recognises what the others bring.
- There’s a balance between what each partner puts in and what it gets out, whether that’s a direct benefit to its mission or a wider benefit to the organisation.
- Partners have a collaborative mindset: you’ll need to commit to building shared ways of working, because that’s what effective partnership is built on.
Ultimately, you need a clear why, what and who: a reason to engage, a shared purpose, and the right partners around the table.
Or…not to partner
Partnerships don’t work so well when:
- There’s a lack of clarity about what the need is, or why working collaboratively is more effective in that context than actors working alone, or transactionally.
- Partners don’t have a collaborative mindset or establish shared ways of working.
- There’s no clear benefit or reason for each partner to engage, or there’s no balance between what partners put in and get out of the partnership.
It’s okay not to partner
Sometimes you might decide a partnership isn’t the right choice: maybe the timing isn’t right, or maybe the combination of partners, needs and goals doesn’t fit. Maybe, in this context, the partnership just wouldn’t be more than the sum of its parts.
It’s also fine to recognise when a relationship is really a transaction, with organisations working together because of their respective expertise. It doesn’t have to be called a partnership.
Deciding not to partner is completely okay. That might sound strange, coming from a partnering organisation. But we really do believe that it’s only worth partnering if you can do it right.
Tools to help you decide
TPI has lots of resources that can help you in making the ‘to partner or not to partner’ decision:
- The internal prospective partnership assessment, which scores a prospective partnership across eight criteria, and is designed to help you reach the ‘go / no-go’ stage during the scoping phase.
- The value assessment framework, which sets out ten sources of genuine collaborative advantage that partnership can unlock, and helps break down the ‘when it’s worth it’ side of the equation.
- Why and when to partner, for more information on the collaboration imperative.
Most of all, the key is not rushing into it. Don’t partner – until you’re ready to do it right.
If you decide to go ahead with your partnership, check out the building blocks of effective partnering.
