We all know that it's challenging to create the perfect work-life balance. Sometimes, your office duties will overwhelm your personal affairs and vice versa. That is why we need to develop effective partnerships to build our organization.
It doesn't matter what we do, where we do it, and how well our services are. Ultimately, for your business to thrive, you need to create the ideal partnerships, from colleagues and family to society. Thankfully, you've come to the right place.
This article will discuss how my role as a partnership manager in my career helps me become a better person in my other circle of life. More importantly, I'll also share a few partnership characteristics that can help anyone. So, let's get down to business, shall we?
Top 5 Ways on How to Build Successful Partnerships
1. Creating the Value
In simple terms, partnerships are two entities that agree to cooperate and advance their mutual interests for their business's success. There are thousands, if not millions, of successful partnerships all around us. For all of them, the core driving force is that both parties are satisfied with the results.
A good example is Gett delivery's collaboration with eBay. Gett Delivery is a tech company with smart delivery service, while eBay is an eCommerce platform. Together, these two companies ensure customer satisfaction with their last-mile delivery solution dedicated to e-commerce products. Amazing, right?
On a personal level, my wife and I also have a partnership system that ensures we are the best versions of ourselves. Yes, you heard that right! Partnerships transcend the confines of the office space. How does our partnership work? We each come up with a schedule and write down our constraints for the upcoming week. That helps us let go of any weight that might pull us down. What's more, we also get to create time to spend with our kids- the most important thing.
2. Sharing responsibilities when it's hard
One of the major perks of having a joint venture is that you get to share responsibilities when there's too much on the table. I read that from an interesting article written by HBS October Magazine.
'Joint venture and partnerships will play an outsize role in those efforts, both as a vehicle for sharing costs and reducing capital needs during the crisis and as a way to position themselves for growth once it ends.'
Partnerships will help steer the company forward even during storms that one entity can't handle. The same principles apply to life experiences. The best recommendation I could give you is first to identify the challenges that your partner is facing (Whether it's your better half or your business partner.) Then, discuss ways to use your partnership to find solutions to the problem and overcome them.
When you realize that a specific challenge can be solved by simply discussing it together, your business and life will flourish. Above all, it becomes easier to solve any turmoil that might come your way. An excellent example of how to listen to your partners was with iStore we found out that the one challenge was to deliver new iPhones at night (because of the lockdown, most customers couldn't come to the store.) So we went above and beyond to come up with a working solution.
3. Inspire and Influence
To create a successful partnership, you must be an inspiration to your workmates. I don't necessarily mean that you should be a successful and wealthy enterprise-no siree! All you have to do is have an admirable work ethic. That means you should be hard-working enough to inspire other companies to want to work with you.
More importantly, inspiration cannot work without a clear channel of communication. Typically, you have to show people that you are a person and you are relatable. Unfortunately, success will quickly inflate one's ego to isolation, especially for leaders. That could lead to alienating the most crucial people in the company. Without a doubt, the best business people will topple if they can't inspire people.
In my world, I've always loved talking to young entrepreneurs and inspiring them to become better business people in the world. After all, the economy is built off of young, energetic business people, and we can't thrive without them.
4. Think About the Long Term
For your partnership to thrive, you must be aware of the long-term goal. That said, you need to find out the purpose and make it part of your present. And since value creation is quantitative and qualitative, no metric could easily measure success. Unfortunately, volatility in this current economic trend isn't something that can be avoided. As such, resilience and buoyancy can only be achieved through partnerships.
Like I said earlier, no one could pridefully say that they've been successful by working alone. Nobody can ever succeed in a silo. Therefore, whatever we venture in-be it political, private, professional, or personal- we must always remember the people who were essential to our success. More importantly, we also need to learn from our past mistakes and masteries.
5. Define the roles
One of the primary challenges you are likely to face in a partnership is; overlapping efforts. The same case applies to a marriage or relationship. That said, you need to define the roles played by each party. You can take care of the delivery, and your partner will take care of the customer relation and Marketing to bring more sales and grow the partnership. That will reduce the chances of overlapped responsibilities and any inconveniences that may arise from that.
Take Away Message
As you can see, creating a thriving partnership in business and private life isn't that hard. However, you should always follow a set of guidelines to ensure your partnership's success. And for that reason, this article will help you approach your collaboration with a much clearer perspective.
