KEEPING AND GROWING SMART PARTNERS

Smart partners drive creativity by increasing the frequency, frankness, and fruitfulness of interpersonal connections, dialogue, and collaboration. When employees are treated as trusted partners in an enterprise, they are freed up to pool their collective creative energies for the benefit of the business as a whole. In this chapter we have proposed three concrete action steps organization leaders can take to keep and grow smart partners: build loyalty and a sense of duty; coach people to grow informal communication networks (pathways); and strengthen relationship skills.

Building loyalty is no longer just an option, and top managers must understand that they contribute greatly to their organization's culture. Informal networks serve as the hidden pathways over which information, ideas, and resources can be exchanged in an elusive, fast-moving marketplace. Leaders need relationship skills to manage a new kind of diversity, one of opinions and ideas and approaches to processing information. Employees need relationship skills to enable people not only to tolerate such diversity of perspectives, but also to cherish it as the fuel of creativity. In Chapter 8 we begin our discussion on building the partnering skills of employees, based on a thorough understanding of the Six Partnering Attributes.