To build a partnership strategy, forget your partners (for now).

If you’re thinking about partnering, or want to get better at it, you’ve probably asked some form of this question before: Whom should I partner with? What tools do I need to partner well? How do I bring people together? What makes for a good partnership goal? How do I structure them?

I get it. In my own partnering journey, I’ve thrown myself in the middle of solving these riddles in the quest to deliver results quickly. Even when I got skilled at often-touted ‘first steps’ like mapping stakeholders, cultivating relationships and negotiating agreements, we rarely ended up anywhere meaningful or had to make difficult recalibrations down the line. Because here’s what I learned: partnering doesn’t start with partnerships, it starts with you.

Partnering is first and foremost an inner game

Because partnering is about connecting and creating value with others, we tend to focus on out there: the state of the world, future outcomes, other players. We are conditioned to focus on the external (external relations, right?) that we forget that partnering actually starts with the person or organization who is wanting to partner. To get really good at the outer game, we must first understand our inner game. With who, what and for what, as well as the tools, practices and processes, follow.

This requires some soul-searching. In practical terms, exploring you/your organization is best done via workshopping (highly recommended) or at the very least a deep listening exercise with your team or higher-ups. I’ll shortly share my question list. To answer these, elicit as much collective intelligence as you can. The very process of interrogation in partnership with others not only builds your partnering muscle, you’ll also begin to sense how you/your organization would behave as a partner.

The point is: if you don’t have a good grasp of why you are partnering, you’ll find yourself in partnerships that don’t have a good grasp of you. You won’t find outer alignment if you don’t have inner alignment. You’ll attract misaligned partners, partner for the wrong reasons, toward wrong purposes and in the wrong ways (even if you think they are ‘right’ at first), and build ineffective tools and processes. It’s not a great use of time or social capital. This is relevant even when you’ve already got partners and are trying to make partnering better or more effective. (I’m told this works in romantic relationships as well...)

I recently had the pleasure of hearing the right question being asked: Where do I begin?

Now we’re getting somewhere. (I also love this question because it comes from a place of curiosity and humility: attributes that make for some of the most powerful partnerships I have seen).

So let’s begin.

6 Questions for starting (or resetting) your partnership strategy

These are the questions I wish I asked. I’ve divided them into two categories: the Self — ie you or your organization, and the World. (You might think: where is the partner in here? The omission is deliberate. Who your partners should be, or what you do with existing partners, are informed by Self and World.)

Questions of Self

• What do we mean by partnering? Is it primarily about expanding reach or entering a new arena? About learning and experience? Perhaps it’s about a capability gap, amplifying the same capabilities, gaining credibility, or simply not having to do things alone. How you define partnering grounds your strategy.
• Why does partnering matter to our overall strategy? Your answer will likely fall into one of two camps: because getting things done is not possible without partners, or because you want ensure sustainability and lasting impact (ie, you can probably make some impact alone, but partners make things ‘sticky’ and irreversible). This first is about viability. The second is about momentum. This tells you a lot about your partnering purpose. In entrepreneurial terms, are you starting up or scaling up?
• What do we already have, and what don’t we have? As I previously noted, we tend to focus on what attributes a partner might have or not. But what about you? Yes, it’s important to note this because your prospective partner will ask the same of you. But it’s more important to make it clear to yourself. Partnerships take a great deal of effort and resources. Conserve your energy for your must-haves.
• What are we willing to invest in and compromise on? Partnerships always require a give for your get. The obvious ones are resources — the extent you’re willing to give time, capital, knowledge. This includes your current capacity to tend to partnerships, and how much you’re able to invest in it. The less obvious ones are intangible. How much leadership are you willing to share? How much of your strategy, approaches and processes would you let them shape? How far are you willing to go to bat for them? Thoughtfully consider your can-dos.

Questions of the World

• Where would we want our partnerships to make an impact? The importance of bounding your quest is paramount. One can easily get carried away, and the wider the arena you want to change, the wider and more unwieldy the ecosystem of partners needs to be. Remember that an ecosystem is built of its component partnerships. What is the sphere (or spheres) in which coming together will make a shift? Is it a place, a sector, a specific leverage point in a system? Keep it manageable.
• What is the impact we want to have in this sphere? Ultimately, partnering is about the effect coming together will make in your chosen field of play. What is the need you are trying to address, and what might a partnership do to address that? Keep it focused, but visionary. Tighter goals and targets will follow.

Bringing it all together

Congratulations! By answering these questions, you have built out the design constraints of your emerging partnership strategy:

• Partnering motivation (keeping it grounded)
• Strategic purpose of partnering (viability vs momentum)
• The gap your partnerships need to fill (must haves)
• How far you’re willing to go to fill that gap (can dos)
• The field of play or sphere/s of impact (keeping it manageable)
• Partnering vision (focus eyes on the prize)

What to do next? That’s for another time (and finally involves actual partners).

The takeaway: It’s tempting to start seeking frameworks, building processes or filling out tools to get your partnership strategy going. It’s even more tempting to start partnering conversations with people and organizations who may have ostensibly aligned goals, resources and capabilities you think you need, or names it would be great to be associated with. Or when someone suggests potential partners (as an unabashed super-connector, I am guilty of doing this often), you may ask what they want, what they bring to the table, where the alignment is.

Halt, take a beat. Are you aligned with you?