Introduction
Getting people on the same page is crucial for developing successful partnerships based on strong and shared sense of vision. It is the cornerstone, and launching point for successful partnering efforts. Visioning in a partnership if different form other uses of the word. It is much more than a defined set of shared goals and aspirations. It exists to offer a tangible guidance system which provides direction to both parties and helps them carry out their larger goals. Such a system enables partnerships to overcome obstacles and achieve results. When they lack vision they tend to drift around, or fall apart. Evidence for this is seen in change failure rates which can be 70%-80% in mergers and acquisitions
“Developing a successful partnership is not like deciding to catch a train going north. it is more taking a badly marked trail that both partners often have to negotiate in the dark. So you can’t easily see where you are, let alone where your partner might be. It is not just about setting the direction you both wish to travel. It has to be a map that guides you forward and tells you are if you are really still together”. (précis of David Montanaro of NEC on the role of vision)
The visioning process is iterative and refines the answers to “Why partner?”. It has to articulate the potential value to give both direction and a justification for the risks and expenses involved.
2. How do you get vision into a partnership?
The research suggests the parties follow a similar track that make sure that there is a vision and that it becomes shared. They are:
- Developing the partnering proposition
- Establish a joint feasibility team
- Create a shared vision
2.1 Developing the partnering proposition
There is great danger in throwing out a one-sided vision to get a partnership underway. The danger is that it never becomes shared, lacks the necessary ownership and commitment from the receiving partner. As a result successful partners tend to avoid “vision” as the starting point rather starting with an attractive business case from which both parties can develop and later develop a truly shared vision.
2.2 Establish a joint feasibility team
Before a shared vision is complete such a team helps generate ownership for the partnering relationship with both organisations. Later we will take a look at who needs to be on the team and why.
2.3 Create a shared vision
This involves not only setting goals and objectives but also acts as a guidance system to steer the collaboration towards its goals.
3 Developing the partnering proposition
Effective visions are never unilateral, for a partnership to work both parties need to commit to a shared road map.
“A unilateral vision puts the author in the role of seller rather than one of partner..”
So where do you start?
In the context of this negotiation I suggest that each partner puts together a value proposition that shows real impact for both parties. Then to share these propositions to create a unified partnering proposition. My reasoning is that it starts the important process where both parties think through as much about the value to their partner as the value to themselves.
This is not a vision but an important step towards it. It is a simple statement as to why a partnership could be valuable to both parties. It has three basic characteristics:
- It is brief, compelling, believable and easy to communicate
- It specifies the impact that each partner will gain through partnering
- It states the major changes that each party must make to create impact.
It is important for both parties to value more the process of achieving their proposition than the document itself. The struggle to distil partnering ideas down into simple and clear statements clarifies and sharpens thinking. It provides a model in the minds of its creators as to what partnership means.
(This turned out to be critical as each of the three partners articulated what they thought the other two would value. In one long evening, each tested their understanding of the others’ value perceptions. Sometimes difficult, sometimes humorous, sometimes embarrassing. At the end of that session there was a strong sense of a job well done and growth in the partnership).
4.Brief, compelling, believable 
Rarely more than a few sentences, it forms the core of the communication process into the partners’ own organisations and doesn’t cover every contingency or potential issues.
Even more importantly, good partnering propositions must convey a powerful message. The power comes from creating both a compelling and believable proposition. It discourages the “motherhood and apple pie” type of statements like:
“partner with us and we’ll double your profitability..”
It ‘s certainly compelling but not very believable. On the other hand, statements like:
“If you are prepared to put in enormous time and effort to set up this partnership with us, there’s a possibility that it will bring modest but worthwhile results”
This is very believable, but it’s hardly compelling.
So, how can you avoid making broad assertions when you can’t yet quantify the benefits to one another. The thing to keep in mind is not to give a comprehensive vision. It is not an answer to all eventualities; it is a goal is to act as a catalyst to raise important questions. A good partnering proposition doesn’t persuade people to partner, it persuades them to look more closely at why partnering might be worthwhile.
So why can’t you just sit down and talk to them? (it is not as though you don’t know each other).
The answer is that, much more than in a sale, partnering discussions should involve a range of people from both sides, many of whom have never met before. You have to satisfy everyone, to convince them that the proposed partner is the right one.
“A painful lesson is that you have to put a lot of effort into internal selling and a big piece of that effort is fighting to keep it simple.”
A strong proposition needs clear, compelling and believable ideas – ideas which internal people can buy into, one which people can understand, and one which is enticing but realistic. This is a necessary starting point on the road to vision.
4.1 Describing the impact
The proposition is a two-way statement of potential; it’s about the impact for both parties through collaboration. This is not a play on words.
“a big difference between selling and partnering is that selling is only about what’s in it for the customer….In a good partnership, right from the earliest contacts, both sides should be interested in what’s in it for each other.”
4.2 Changes that each party must make
It is as important to say what each party gains as to what each other has to ‘pay’. No business case can be constructed without looking at both benefits and costs.
4.3 One presentation fits all
When moving into a partnership, one of the first signs of progress is candid information sharing. The best test to meet this condition is that the proposition could be presented, unedited and unchanged, to people from either organisation.
“When you talk about partnering, you talk about the extended enterprise. You don’t do anything based solely on your own internal needs…So a presentation should work for you and your partner because the strategy articulated is based on the market, not on internal needs..” (Rick Keene, Anixter’s Executive V.P..)
Imagine that whatever internal presentation you make to your senior management is also given to your intended partner’s own management. How much would you have to change? If you would need to reword points to make them more palatable, or exclude important data, then you have not produced a partnering proposition.
5. The joint feasibility team
The joint nature of developing the proposition and then vision is to overcome
any element being generated unilaterally. Propositions developed unilaterally, fact three hurdles:
- They lack important business information
- The lack a plan of action
- They are only propositions – “your” propositions
To get over these hurdles is a core activity for the joint team. To look at the business case and, as a result of working together, produce something that is “owned” by both organisations.
5.1 Who needs to be on the team?
It helps to have roughly equal numbers from both sides and a rough equivalence of seniority and experience.
Even more important, the team should have certain roles represented on both sides. They are:
- hands-on experts, people who are close to the action and the interfaces you are seeking to set up. Expertise and willingness to sweat the details are essential factors.
- missionaries, people who believe in the partnership and will go out to preach the faith to the corporate heathen. One of the signs that a partnership has high impact potential is the willingness of people to carry the message enthusiastically through their own organisations.
- big hitters, people with clout who can overcome tough hurdles, to push through the myriad sceptics and challengers who will appear when the relationship begins moving outside the norm. (this does necessarily mean senior managers, more people who have access to them)
“To maintain the relationship and trust some team members need to be heard and listened to by senior management, on both sides. They have to have the clout to control what goes on in the partnership. It’s making sure that everybody understands that within the organisations they are in a partnership and that its based on trust, and we can’t afford to, in anyway cause distrust.” (Andrew Micthell, a Global Account Manager, Oracle)
6. Creating the shared vision
Moving from committed proposition to vision is the next step. There’s no simple formula. 
Vision requires thinking about possibilities that, by definition, don’t yet exist. So what do you do?
We suggest that you do not need a sweeping vision of change to get a partnering relationship started. The dramatic vision, if ever it comes, tends to emerge once partners are working and have better familiarity with the possibilities. Successful partners start with something “they can get their arms around and make successful”. The closest to a method of creating a vision is what we call the one company image. In essence it’s a simple and powerful idea. It is founded on you and your partner imagining that you are no longer separate organisations and are free to make any changes in your working relationship which will improve the overall effectiveness of your “new venture”.
The changes identified make up the value of partnering and begins the process of laying out a vision of change. In any successful partnership studied found that, at the core of the vision, is a willingness to put aside organisational boundaries to tap into savings or new sources of productivity. It’s like looking at a process and not two organisations.
6.1 The Quick Win
No matter how mundane or revolutionary the vision, it is important to combine it with a quick win. It provides an immediate goal and a first successful milestone to show the partnership is starting to produce results:
“It is a way to energise a partnership. This means moving ahead toward specific steps and away from…the general vision” (James Adelson, Director, Business Alliances Group at Lotus)
If this is not possible, you can sometimes get the same results by helping a partner see what the results have looked like elsewhere. Either way, most successful partners get beyond shared vision and into demonstrable value very quickly.
6.2 Combining vision with the steps needed to achieve it
Too many partnering teams spend their time focusing solely on the goals of the partnership ignoring how they are going to achieve them:
“It’s not enough to have a piece of paper and then say, so now we have an alliance…” (Dick McIihattan, a V.P. at Bechtel)
Once a team has a joint sense of the vision, it then needs to lay out concrete steps as to how it is going to achieve it.
6.3 Setting targets: the guided missile
Too many groups work on the basis of “ready, aim, fire” only to find that the target has moved. It is more useful to see targeting as firing a guided missile. You begin by identifying your target, say “to extract the maximum productivity from the interface between the two companies”. Then you design a guidance system to tell you if your headed in the right direction, whether the target has moved and, if so, what mid-course corrections you might need to make. In this way, when you fire your partnership missile, you may only have a rough idea of where the target will be, but you have the equivalent of a heat seeking capability that will hunt down productivity opportunities as they emerge and lock on to them.
Those partnerships that can achieve this have developed guidance systems to hit moving targets whilst their competitors are still loading cannons and firing them at targets that have vanished long before their shells have reached their destination.
To be successful, you do need to have a broad ideas of goals. But you don’t try to define the location of the target down to that last few inches. That’s what your guidance system should do after your missile (partnership) has been launched.
So what should a partnership guidance system look like? Successful partnerships generally spend significant time up front defining:
- expectations about how the two parties will work together
- measures for assessing how well the partnership is earning its keep and encouraging continuous improvement
6.3 Partnering expectations
A clear guidance mechanism for partnership is establishing clear mutual expectations about how each party will act and what each should expect from the other. Some have gone as far as to create a partnership document in which details mutual expectations. This isn’t a legal contract. For example, in McGregor Cory (UK contract distribution specialist) they include items like:
“a willingness for open dialogue”…and…”a capacity to adapt to constant change”
In addition, the expectations document covers performance criteria and sets up agreed communication channels.
The clearer each party is about roles, responsibilities an mutual expectations, the easier it will be for them to act quickly and consistently to guide the partnership towards constantly moving targets.
6.4 Partnership measures
An essential element to any guidance system is its capability to measure deviation from the target and to take corrective action. One critical function of the joint team is to specify and design some initial measures to assess whether or not the partnership is performing to expectations. Successful partners spend a great deal of time defining appropriate measures to ensure that the vision becomes a reality.
Measures used range widely form the hard to soft, to more simple productivity measures. What ever measures, defining substantive means to test success of the vision is one of the most important and common elements in successful partnering.
(Author’s Note: This Blog is based on my consulting for Prudential Portfolio Management’s successful outsourcing of its global custody and unitised accounting operation to a consortium of Mellon Bank (now BNY Mellon) and Midland Bank (now HSBC). It is based on research by Neil Rackham, Larry Friedman and Dick Ruff ,Huthwaite Inc. (HInc) and I would be grateful that its source could be acknowledged.)
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Nick Anderson, The Crispian Advantage© Copyright All Rights Reserved, The Crispian Advantage 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nick Anderson, The Crispian Advantage and Walk the Talk – A Blog for Agile Minds with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.