FINDING SMART PARTNERS

But what do smart partners look like? In the Dual Age of Information and Connections, companies must rethink the competencies they view as being core to their organization's culture and success. In the twenty-first century, smart partnering is emerging as one of the preeminent competencies needed for outstanding job performance— a linchpin that ties together all other workplace behaviors into an organic network of high-performance capability. These partnering-enabling competencies must form the foundation for an organization's human performance system going forward. Hiring people with these partnering competencies accelerates the building of a partnering culture, and thus a partnering organization. In this chapter we discuss the competencies that directly drive partnering behaviors and describe what it takes to identify these and other partnering competencies and to ensure their alignment with a strategic framework, the success of which hinges on smart partnering.