Honesty powers partnerships through it all
Charities can’t succeed alone. Kawika Solidum explains what you need to know to succeed in your cross-sector partnership.
“This isn’t working the way I thought it would.”
We’ve all felt this way at one time or another in our working lives. When it is just you sat in front of your screen waiting for that breakthrough to occur, it can feel like ages of thinking it’s all happening to you.
Especially when you’re working in a team and work depends on others, you — or your team as a whole — that breakthrough you need can sometimes feel further away than ever.
BeyondMe enables business professionals to take a leading role in supporting the causes they care passionately about by forming BeyondMe teams that work in partnership with a charity for a year. Since we launched our first team in 2011, BeyondMe now has helped to launch over 180 BeyondMe team — each working in partnership with a charity in our portfolio with a project or set of projects that will leave them in a better position serve others who seek their support.
In this time, we’ve collected data tracking the performance and impact of each of these partnerships. We do this to understand the best way BeyondMe can launch more of these partnerships, understand the role we can play in sustaining them and increase the value they deliver to social sector organisations working on important societal challenges.
So over the years we’ve gained a fair amount of experience about making critical partnerships successful. We’ve found 5 major factors to check if your partnership is successful:
Even when a BeyondMe team kicks off its partnership with a charity with each of these in mind, life and work is complex and as with any long-term project, there’s a chance of encountering a roadblock.
In the handful of times BeyondMe team partnerships have reached an impasse that hinders impact, we’ve seen it down to these factors:
- Mis-matched expectations
- Lack of information and /or communication
- A drastic change in context.
There have been instances where the BeyondMe team of professionals has to understand how it is performing and unpick any issues limiting its output. There are other examples where charity staff find it difficult to strike the right balance of providing information, time and guidance to enable the BeyondMe team to deliver.
What these examples have in common is a significant change in any one of the myriad elements above that underpin a robust partnership. And if there is a drastic change in the context, whether it’s members of the BeyondMe team being seconded abroad or a charity’s shift in strategy, the first five points outlined above serve as a guide to achieve re-alignment.
Resilience in your partnership will help when things don’t go to plan. But you only benefit from it when there is honesty — with yourself, with your team members, and also your client.
And the next time things aren’t working they way you thought, don’t leave it long before you find a way to be honest about the situation and consider what you can still make happen, rather than focus on what is happening to you.
