A Partnership Checkup

Partnerships are different from teams. Teams generally have someone in the role of leader; partnerships generally do not. Partnerships are relationships in which using your “I’m the boss” position is either ineffective or inappropriate. In some ways, partnerships are “marriages of equals” with a common vision and mutual values, but with different talents and/or resources. The objective is to use the relationship to effectively harness those unique talents to achieve shared goals.

This Partnership Checkup tool can be copied and used without permission.

Step One: Reflection

Whoa … you may have already scanned the following ten items and thought about it for a nanosecond and felt ready to go on to part two. If you are reading this when you have limited time to reflect, please put it aside and come back to it when you can focus … that might more likely be early on a Sunday morning, not on Monday afternoon!

Think about the important relationship you are using this Partnership Checkup to examine. If he/she/they were answering the following ten questions for you, what might they say?

1. How often do you go beyond what your customers or colleagues expect in a relationship?

2. How often do you do extras for customers or colleagues just for the heck of it?

3. How often do you take a loss to help out a customer or colleague?

4. What is your emotional reaction to missing a promised deadline? To delivering lower quality than you promised?

5. How do you usually react to customers or colleagues whose attitude you consider selfish or greedy?

6. How important is bringing your very best to key relationships? What would your previous partners say about this?

7. If your son or daughter (assume you have one if you do not) picked a business day at random and could secretly watch you in all your business relationships, what would he or she learn about your partnering behavior and attitude?

8. What are the areas in previous partnerships where you had difficulty sharing control?

9. In what areas of a partnership do you find it most difficult to be completely candid?

10. When an important partnership gets contentious or laced with conflict, how would your partner describe your typical approach to resolving differences?

Step Two: Improving Your Partnership

Provide short answers to the following questions. Then meet with your partner(s) and compare answers as a trigger to an improvement discussion.

1. Ways I uniquely benefit my partner are …

2. The unique benefit I gain most from my partner is …

3. The primary value(s) critical to our effectiveness is (are) …

4. My partner would probably describe me as …

5. My gut tells me we’d work better if I would stop or start …

6. I believe I irritate my partner most when I …

7. The consequence of my being more candid/frank is …

8. What this partnership is teaching me is …

9. We generally have our biggest conflicts about …

10. An area we have not talked about that we should is …