Humans are social creatures. We tend to assume we know how to collaborate. We work in teams, build relationships, navigate differences. Partnering, surely, is just something innate; something we do.
But here’s the problem. That assumption is often wrong, and it’s reducing our impact.
At The Partnering Initiative, we’ve spent over two decades working with organisations across sectors to help them collaborate more effectively. And the single biggest barrier we encounter isn’t a lack of goodwill. It’s a lack of professional partnering capability.
The gap between need and practice
Ask anyone who has tried to run a cross-sector partnership, and they’ll tell you it was harder than expected. The research backs this up. In a global survey of practitioners, 86% said that if they’d had proper partnering training, their partnerships would have been more effective, faster to develop, and more likely to deliver results.
Yet only 14% said that partnering training was available to them.
This gap, between the need for partnering capacity versus investing in the capability, is where so many partnerships quietly struggle.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s an invitation. Because the good news is that effective transformational partnering can be learned.
What makes partnering so difficult?
Here’s something we hear a lot: “We’re good at relationships. We know how to work with people.” And that’s probably true. But partnering as organisations is a different challenge entirely.
When we collaborate as individuals, we naturally gravitate towards people who think like us, share our values, and work in similar ways. Even then, it takes effort. Now imagine bringing together three organisations from different sectors: each with its own culture, incentives, risk appetite, governance structures, and ways of working
Getting those actors into a genuine, productive partnership doesn’t happen by accident. The way you build the relationship, develop the governance, manage the collaboration day-to-day, have honest conversations when things aren’t working, all of it matters. It’s the difference between a partnership that delivers real change and one that quietly fades, leaving everyone wondering what went wrong.
What professionalising partnering means
At the individual level, professionalising partnering means developing must-have partnering competencies:
- a collaborative mindset,
- the ability to understand other sectors and what drives them,
- strong relationship-building skills, and
- solid technical knowledge of how partnerships are structured and managed.
But individuals can only do so much if their organisation isn’t set up to support them. Becoming truly fit for partnering means having capabilities and structures, like partnership units, that can develop genuine partnership agreements, not just procurement contracts. It means HR systems that understand, value and reward partnering skills. It means leadership that champions collaboration and creates the space for it to happen.
When those things are in place, partnerships move faster, trust builds more easily, and when challenges arise, as they always do, there’s a strong enough foundation to work through them together.
The mindset underneath it all
There’s one more ingredient that no amount of process can fully substitute for: mindset.
Effective partnering requires a genuine willingness to create value for your partner, not just yourself. It requires comfort with ambiguity; the recognition that when you bring different organisations, sectors, and perspectives together, the answer that emerges may not be the one you expected or would have reached alone. And it requires a readiness to share power, to co-create, and to give up a degree of autonomy in pursuit of something bigger.
The stakes are high enough to get this right
We are living in a time that demands collaboration at scale. The challenges we face cannot be solved by any single actor or sector acting alone. Governments, businesses, civil society, and communities all have a role to play, and the only way to align their resources effectively is through partnerships that are genuinely transformational.
That won’t happen by accident, or by goodwill alone, but when we invest in the professional partnering capabilities of our people and our organisations.
*This blog draws on a conversation between TPI Executive Director Darian Stibbe and Alberto Lidj on the [Do One Better podcast Listen to the full episode to hear more on partnering mindset, institutional capability, and what it takes to build collaborations that truly deliver.*
Partnerships That Work: Darian Stibbe on Trust, Incentives and Cross-Sector Collaboration | Podcasts
