How can you create a shared vision and culture with your partners?

Partnership comes from meaningful relationships. To truly add value, it’s important to look first at your own commitment to social value. In your own organisation, the culture you cultivate and the accountability you hold yourselves to with your people, customers and supply partners. This assists future partners to identify values based alignment, and move beyond transacting to collaborative cultures. These withstand unpredictable shocks and market pressures because the relationality is grounded in respect for place and its needs and aspirations.

The quality is key when it comes to communication. Better less and shorter, but regular and relevant. Everyone needs to feel empowered to voice their needs and observations. I embrace feedback, and I take time to understand the causes and motivations behind. Before communicating, in sensitive cases, I seek alignment and test my decision. It is key that I communicate relevant information only, respecting their effort and time. I avoid too many channels and tools, carefully ensuring there is always something new. It helps to agree with the audience on preferences and customize my communication to fit their expectations. To resolve potential obstacles, I entertain the direct exchange, being approachable and open to listen carefully.

What is working well for me, is to start mapping out the WHY, WHAT and HOW of each partner organization, the undertaking, and the people around the table. The joint review of these creates awareness of each other and allows to identify the links. It is important to carve out those touchpoints that create the value for everyone to engage and achieve together, as it is about a win-win for everyone. It helps to ask the partners to share their perspectives, before agreeing on a set of messages that resonate with everyone. That resonance is needed to ignite the vibration that powers the collaboration. Regularly I share those messages and I relate achievements to those, to touch the nerve and create the emotions along with execution.

This is a great summary. I'm thing I'd highlight is building alignment toward a the goals and outcomes of a particular partner project and then using agreement on the key outcomes and impact as a way to ensure alignment to a shared vision for that project. Sometimes it's easier to start with the granular, tangible and measurable and build up to shared vision, which will become evident from setting agreed milestones goals etc.

It is always paramount to me, in any relationship, that I am as much perceived as a valuable partner as I am eager to have that feeling about the others. I am aware of my responsibility in delivering on the trust I receive. A transparent and genuine communication around risks, achievements and failures, is important. The difference is made in my response to events. This is when I provide evidence to the others, that they use to validate their trust in me. Regular check-ins are vital to gather early signs of me losing them. So, I stay very close to everyone and I truly care for their satisfaction, while holding everyone equally responsible to me. Trust is given to overcome uncertainty and still perform. I therefore avoid surprises.

To foster innovation, it needs intuition to strive. I therefore ensure that organizational and operational duties do not distract the team, entertaining the atmosphere for creativity. I ensure the team has the tools and resources needed to perform at its best. E.g., access to data, computing power, AI/ML/data science if needed. I have good experience in helping the team to understand intuition and how their thinking works. Actively shaping their mindset, I encourage access to knowledge beyond the traditional perspective, allowing the team to swap responsibilities to learn and develop their thinking. It is important to act on any idea and make a conscious team decision what to do, before moving to the next. Celebrate every contribution.

Diversity is key. We are strong together in our differences, not being all alike. If we want to shine, we need all colors of life. It is important to entertain the awareness of everyone's talent and motivation. It needs a careful support of the team, sensing conflict and avoiding escalation. With diversity comes an increased need for me to focus on interpersonal skills of the team and to develop those actively. It is not enough to focus on methodology and outcome. I take time to read every individual and support them in fertilizing each other creatively, bringing in their potential and benefiting from others, while everyone being their true self. This brings complexity, however it drives impressive creativity and innovation.

Involves forging strong, strategic partnerships with aligned missions and goals. Actively involve partners in the decision-making process, and ensure they have opportunities to meet and understand the community you both intend to serve. Effective communication is key; maintain open and transparent lines of communication, share common values and objectives, and work together to develop a shared vision. Being selective and strategic in choosing partners who are closely aligned with your mission and objectives is essential for building a culture of shared vision and collaboration.