Building sustainable Partnership
Building partnership, in a perfect way, requires significant effort, understanding, and willingness from everyone involved. The success of your partnership depends on trust, effective communication, mutual ambitions and reliability of the partners. On average, as many as 50% new partnerships fail every year due to a lack of these principles. So, it is important to know the ways for building sustainable partnerships.
Since the success of your business depends on your ability to create and maintain meaningful and productive partnerships, below are a few tips that you can use to create long-lasting and purposeful partnerships.
1. Strengths and weaknesses
If you want to find a partner who can effectively help you grow your business, you should first know about what your own weaknesses and strengths are. Get a partner who has their own skill set and value to bring to the table. Building sustainable partnership with people who are skilled in a different area than you will introduce variety in the skill-set of your business and also help you focus on your own area of expertise. Sustainable partnerships where each partner has their own skill set will be more effective since each partner has their own area to focus on.
2. Long-term goals
When you go looking for a partner, discuss your long-term goals and share your vision with them. It is very important for the partners to agree on a vision for the business. The approach of each partner towards the vision can be different depending on their personality. Having various approaches towards a goal saves you the time of making up a completely new approach if one fails. The shared goals and ambitions are what matter at the end.
3. Define roles
What if you have a partner who brings their own value and share your ambitions, but your roles in business are not defined properly or at all? This will lead to an overlapping of efforts and decrease the efficiency of your business. When partnering with someone, consider making job descriptions and roles for partners so that everyone has their own individual tasks assigned to them. The roles can also change as required, but they should always be explicitly discussed and agreed upon beforehand.
4. Communicate effectively
As your business grows, your problems will too. It is very important for partners to maintain good communication from the start so that you can cope with problems in the future. Effective and efficient communication is what matters. Discuss business problems mutually and seek solutions together. Who knows, your partner may have a solution to the problem you have been stressing about. Keep your partners updated about the progress on your end, and ask them to do the same. Communicate using your voice rather than e-mails or text messages, because in writing, tone and intentions can sometimes be misinterpreted very easily.
5. Respect
Respect and care for your partners. Do not exploit their weaknesses and never take advantage of a partner’s trust. It may seem attractive in a certain situation, but does it sound like a good thing? Do not expect your partner to do all the work for you and make sure that your partner is comfortable with the amount of work they have.
6. Put things in black and white
This is a must if you want to take your partnership long-term. Having everything, that has been agreed upon, in writing will help you keep it professional – especially if your partner is a family member or a close friend. A partnership agreement will be written a proof of all the roles, equity, and duties assigned to each partner; alleviating many reasons for conflict.
7. Take responsibility
Being able to accept your mistakes and recognize your own actions is a must for a rigid partnership. Never play the blame game. Do not try to shift the blame of your mishaps onto someone else. More importantly; If you make a mistake, admit it and let your partner know so that both of you can recognize the gravity of the situation and proceed towards solutions. Don’t wait for your partner to call you out, just try to not repeat the mistake again and again.
8. Address issues
By not conveying your grievances timely, you will not be able to focus on any progress whatsoever. Create an environment in which all partners have equal rights and say. Do not hold grudges against your partner if they have done something to your discontent. Make them realize what they are doing wrong and come up with a way around the problem.
9. Prioritize the issues
Every problem or issue cannot be discussed in a formal meeting. Be prepared to tackle all kinds of problems and allow the partners to have autonomy to an extent in their field of operations. Taking these steps to ensure that the work does not stop if a partner is not available for consultation. Define early on what issues must be discussed between all partners before anyone takes action.
10. Support and understand
Partnerships are a constant work in progress. Do not let issues be swept under the rug, but also do not make a huge deal out of a minor inconvenience. As a partner, it is your job to make sure that others are comfortably working in their own space without any resentments and negativity. You have invested your time in building sustainable partnership, so do not let it fall apart over small things.
Conclusion:
When looking for and selecting a partner, try to find someone who can help and guide you in the area for which you lack the necessary expertise. The crucial question to ask is, will you both be able to achieve your goals working together? A successful partnership is one in which all the partners are open to discussion and more inclined towards solving problems, rather than the opposite. It is actually known as building sustainable partnership.
