How will your partnership run on a day-to-day basis? Will it be smooth, effective and efficient or will you have overlaps, confusion and dropped balls?
In my previous article, I talked about the first two steps in creating great business partnerships — the importance of doing your due diligence before selecting a business partner and of establishing roles and responsibilities.
The next three steps are equally important:
3. Define your decision making process. How will both the day-to-day and major decisions be made? Look at every aspect of running an organization, the myriad of decisions, their impact on the organization, and then define how those decisions will be made. Will they fall under each partner’s functional area or will decision-making be shared? How will differences of opinion be handled? Partnership does not necessarily mean consensus and disagreements are inevitable, so know how you will deal with it before it happens.
4. Establish leadership role. Partnerships are not completely flat organizations. They do have leaders. Leaders play multiple roles and the partnership may have multiple leaders depending on the situation or task at hand. Will you confer on everything or will you divide leadership roles. Perhaps one of you is more skilled at the strategic leadership required to run your company. What is the most effective leadership model for your organization?
5. Communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more. Know and respect yours and your partner’s communication style. How do you each best receive and process information? How often should you be communicating? About what? Be aware of the quality of your communications—are you falling into the trap of “group think”? Successful partners know how to cultivate healthy disagreement by challenging each other’s position in an effort to reach the best solution for the company.
What are some of the successful ways you have designed your company to fit your partnership?
Article Source : 7 Steps to Creating Great Business Partnerships – Part 2 : ArticleBase
Barri Carian -
About the Author:
Author of “Creating New Business Partnerships – A Workbook for Success,” Barri Carian has over 17 years of expertise on what it takes to create a sustainable business partnership, from choosing wisely to feeding and nurturing the relationship. Most of this knowledge has come from conducting dozens of what Barri calls “partnership interventions”, all in an effort to save the relationship, partnership and thus the business.
In determining the root cause of partnership problems, Barri realized that most conflicts could have been prevented had the partners invested the time upfront to uncover their own motivations and expectations, get clarity on the values and expectations of their potential partner, and had the courage to have the fierce conversations to come to mutual agreement and understanding.
Her workbook is a culmination of Barri’s experience and contains the methodologies and tools she used in my work with business partners. It is designed as a self-help workbook and is filled with tons of valuable exercises, checklists and tools. In sharing this work it is Barri’s hope to make accessible to the millions of entrepreneurs thinking about a partnership, the information to make better decisions and create successful business partnerships.


