BENEFITS OF A PARTNERING CULTURE

Creating a partnering culture positions an organization to accrue four chief benefits:

• Openness—being sensitive to shifts in attitudes and trends

• Creativity—inventing and innovating new products and services

• Agility—responding quickly to both opportunities and threats

• Resiliency—hanging in there and bouncing back

What can these four benefits mean to an organization? Let's look at each of them now briefly (they are described in fuller detail in Chapters 8–10 and the conclusion, respectively).

Openness

A partnering culture encourages the smart partnering attribute Self-Disclosure and Feedback. Without accurate information about a trading partner's needs and wants, the success of any marketplace exchange falls largely to chance. More often than not, someone does not get what she wanted and resentment, recrimination, and retaliation may soon follow—-overtly in some instances but more commonly covertly. In a company in which people value and practice the art of self-disclosure and feedback, higher levels of openness become easier to attain.

Openness is more than passive receptivity to communication. Rather, our definition of the word encompasses the broader meaning of being in tune with both the stimulants and the depressants in an environment, recognizing both the elixirs and the poisons. For example, what are your customers saying to their friends and neighbors about the last time they called your customer care center and were put on hold for a half-hour? Seeing a market segment accurately and fully is made easier and quicker when many, rather than fewer, eyeballs are scanning the landscape. A partnering infrastructure enables the systematic syncing up of the binoculars of all the partners. Everyone sees more, everyone benefits. Smart partnering produces enhanced openness. Smart partnering helps you see the marketplace.

Creativity

In a partnering culture, creativity comes about most directly from two partnering attributes: Future Orientation and Comfort with Change. Together they form a sturdy platform for creativity and innovation. Creativity at its heart involves seeing the same old things in new ways, letting go of how one has viewed things and done things in the past. Leaders locked primarily in a past orientation—shackled by predispositions about what should be there, certain that the way it was is the way it is—will find it hard to encourage working men and women to strike out in new directions. A partnering culture, on the other hand, establishes future orientation as a basic tenet. Yet, having a future orientation without being comfortable with change will produce only empty dreams, illusory aspirations, and delusional desires. Comfort with Change steadies us to take the plunge, to risk belittle-ment, punishment, even failure.

Agility

In the twenty-first century, agility, the best risk-management tool any enterprise can have, will require more than nimbleness and speed of foot. Agility now requires competence and resources. The trick, of course, is bringing together competent people with the resources they need in a quick, efficient manner. Going forward, fewer and fewer companies will have the bucks or the bravado to house all the competencies they need or to warehouse all the resources they need. Without the expediting function of a partnering infrastructure, organizations will find it increasingly difficult to act with the agility required to leverage budding opportunities or to defend against impending threats.

In a partnering culture, the smart partnering attribute Win-Win Orientation forms the currency of marketplaces. Interconnections among marketplaces give an organization ready access to competencies and resources it does not possess in-house. Links build agility. Outsourcing and cosourcing are the more formal kinds of relationships that can be consummated in this regard. However, advantage in the twenty-first century will more likely derive from the informal links among marketplaces … talking across backyard fences. Bolstered by the smart partnering attribute Ability to Trust, an element that must support win-win solutions to assure ongoing agility, informal exchanges across marketplaces will deliver competent people, information, technology, and material to where it is needed, when it is needed, how it is needed, at the price desired. Free-flowing talent and resources will redefine the kind of agility an organization will require to survive and thrive. Smart partnering creates the connections, dredges the channels deep, and propels the traffic.

Resiliency

When all six attributes of a partnering culture work together to reinforce each other, a partnering organization achieves resiliency. To sustain itself, to adjust continually to changes beyond its control, to see what others do not, and to capitalize on those insights, an organization must be instilled thoroughly with all six attributes of smart partnering, but especially with Comfort with Interdependence. Exponentially accelerating performance will result when partnering is "how things are done around here" and we trust each other to partner smartly. What Comfort with Interdependence adds to the mix is the sustainability that results when I am willing to carry some of your load and you are willing to carry some of mine. And neither of us complains about having to do someone else's job.

Comfort with Interdependence in particular enables continuity and vibrancy in marketplaces. The great leap forward occurs when I finally trust you to help me get what I need after I have found out, usually the hard way, that I cannot get it for myself. To do this, I must let go of myself. French author Simone de Beauvoir once tendered in a Life magazine article in the late 1960s: "Freedom means only that I get to choose whose slave I will be." Liberated from the tyranny of self-reliance, I can now help you get what you need by accessing my network. A marketplace of one is by definition a self-abusive fantasy Marketplaces want to be self-reinforcing, and it is in such self-reinforcement that an organization finds its resiliency. A summary of how all six characteristics of a partnering organization work together to produce resiliency, to create a Partnering Powerhouse, is provided in the conclusion.