The business climate continues to change and, as a result, the issues faced by all organisations are becoming increasingly complex. In order to provide a quality service and offer best value, there is an inexorable move in both the public and private sectors towards developing long-term collaborative working relationships. In such an arrangement, organisations are entrusting their corporate performance to partner organisations and such an approach sets a challenge in that these deeper partnership relationships demand a high degree of development and skill.

One such example were two organisations that had already experienced some adhoc partnering relationships that had not really always been thought through and there was a myriad of differing approaches. Our brief was to run some workshops to help the partnering teams to understand how to get the best out of the partnerships that they are involved in and to provide the participants with the skills and understanding about future partnering arrangements.

We designed an approach that involved several elements:

1. Pre Programme Work
It was recommended that participants undertook some pre work. There were two tasks to complete:

• Create a map of the key partnerships
• Some simple questions to consider about their partnering relationships
  

2. Workshop One: About Partnerships (Half Day)

• What is a partnership?
  
• Healthy Partnership Checklist
  
• Linking the internal and external elements
  
• Partnership Agreements: roles and responsibilities
  
• Challenges presented by partnership working and exploration of possible solutions

3. Home-Working: Reflection and action planning

Task:

• Completion of Self Assessment Questionnaire on partnering skills to identify personal strengths and development needs
  
• Identification of priorities
  
• Issue/download appropriate e-Skills Learning Pack that includes questionnaires and reflective questions as preparation for the Action Learning set. Subjects include:
  

o Managing people who you do not have management responsibility for (internally and within partnership)
o Managing internal challenges and barriers
o Influencing skills - (self and others to make partnerships successful)
o Collaboration/developing a shared vision and goals
o Sustaining motivation both individually and for the partnership
o Keeping partnerships on track
o Group dynamics
o Interdependencies – planners and operators
o Maximising motivations of each partner (individual and organisations)

4. Action Learning: Development of Personal Skills

Simple tools and models were made available for each of these areas by the facilitator. Participants prioritised what they needed to focus on and used each other’s experiences to learn, with the professional support of the facilitator. Topics tended to cover:

• Managing people who you do not have management responsibility for (internally and within partnership)
  
• Managing internal challenges and barriers
  
• Influencing skills - (self + others to make partnerships successful)
  
• Collaboration/developing a shared vision and goals
  
• Sustaining motivation both individually and for the partnership
  
• Keeping partnership on track
  
• Group dynamics
  
• Interdependencies – planners and operators
  
• Maximising motivations of each partner (individual and organisations)

The result was that a common partnering process was identified as the ideal way forward for future partnering in the organisation and there was a lot of positive feedback about how helpful the e-Learning Packs had been.