Leadership and Partnership

Partnership has become vital in our increasingly interconnected world. Organizations find it harder to succeed on their own, without partners. We need a better understanding of the meaning of partnership and how it connects to leadership. Perhaps reflecting on the nature of partnership can make us think differently about the meaning of leadership.

Leadership, as traditionally defined, can be cast as a type of selling in that we expect leaders to sell us their vision of a brighter future, to inspire us that they know where to take us and how to get there. If we believe they can do so, we place our trust in them to take us to their envisioned destination and, in the process, enrich our lives.

Leaders can be said to ‘own’ a vision, which they try to inspire us to buy into. Conversely, partnerships are more about shared ownership of a vision based on mutual interests, where all partners bring their own needs and meet somewhere in the middle. Selling may still be involved but often facilitation skills are more critical than the ability to sell one’s own vision. Facilitation skills can foster shared ownership where every partner in the relationship has a share in creating a joint way forward. Facilitation is more about give-and-take, negotiation and compromise to find win-win agreements than it is about one-way selling.

Passive vs Active Facilitation

Passive facilitation is simply a way of managing meetings that allows all involved a fair share of the airtime. Skilled passive facilitators do not contribute much content; they merely chair the meeting, acting as a referee to ensure that everyone is given time to speak without undue interruption or harassment.

Active facilitation means using an arsenal of engaging questions of the form “What do you think?” and “What do you want?” that, if used skillfully, have the potential to draw out the needs and thinking of partners more deeply than a passive approach might do. Active facilitators do not need to contribute much content either or sell a point of view. Instead, they draw content out of others by asking what they think on specific issues and what they really want based on what’s most important to them.

Active facilitation goes beyond just gathering information on people’s opinions and wants, however. Well designed questions can also probe the implications of the opinions and wants of others as a way of stimulating them to think differently, to facilitate broader thinking about situations and their own needs or wants. Engaging questions can be assertive by raising sensitive issues but in a way that is not confrontational. Such questions ask how people would deal with certain unseen implications of their own thinking without directly telling them that they are wrong, a style that would indeed be confrontational.

Active facilitators can contribute new thinking while remaining in facilitation mode by posing their ideas in the form of engaging questions. For example, suppose you say you want to do X and I can see that X has certain undesirable implications for you, me or both of us. Instead of saying so, I can ask you “If we do X, how do you suggest we handle a, b, or c problems if they arise?’ Let’s say that you don’t have an answer for my question so I then ask “How would you feel about doing Y instead of X? Doing Y can avoid problems a, b and c. How do you think doing Y might meet our shared needs better than X?” By asking a question about the possibility of doing Y instead of X, I am striving to foster a shared ownership decision rather than to sell my own views to my partner. I might go on to ask you to list the benefits of Y over X and, when you are done, add other benefits that I can see, again in the form of engaging questions: “What about this feature, how much of a benefit would it be do you think?”

Of course, my partner may have other reasons for rejecting Y. There will always be issues where we have to “agree to disagree” which leaves us with two choices: We can ask “What are some other ways we can work together or matters we can collaborate on?” “How do you think you might contribute to our latest project?” Or, we can find a different partner. Unlike being a leader, we can’t simply impose our will on a prospective partner.

Leadership as Partnership

Leadership cannot be conceived fully as a form of partnership, except perhaps in situations where leaders are elected. Wherever leaders are appointed, they have more authority over their teams than they ever have over partners except where they hold the greatest bargaining power. Using power to manipulate either employees or weak partners risks creating resentment rather than genuinely shared ownership of decisions and plans.

However, we can talk about partnership as a leadership style. Leaders using active facilitation questions similar to the ones they use with partners can apply this approach to creating a new direction or vision within their own teams. They simply have to use engaging questions in meetings to draw strategic ideas out of team members or colleagues to generate a shared vision or strategy. Engaging leadership is based on what used to be called a ‘pull’ influencing style while advocating or selling our own thinking is based on a ‘push’ influencing style.

The Leader as Hero

We don’t often talk about the downsides of our preferred heroic model of leadership where leaders sell their vision to us in such an inspiring, compelling way that we feel a sense of hero worship toward them. The clearest downside of this way of viewing leadership is its creation of dependency. The more we look up to leaders, the more we depend on them to do the right thing. This can lead us to feel that they never, in fact, do the wrong thing. Dependency is another word for disempowerment. We disempower ourselves by effectively abdicating our own thinking ability to the heroic leader.

Heroic leaders can be very inspiring but the cost is unsupportable because we are not then engaged in deciding what to do. We may feel committed to the heroic leader’s vision but this is the commitment of the cult follower, not the motivation of independent thinkers with a stake in the plan. Leaders need to get work done through others but in a knowledge-driven age, this means mental work not just doing tasks. For this reason, heroic leadership is not in line with this new reality.

Partnership Inspiration

A facilitative style of leadership can be inspiring, not by one person selling us a compelling vision but by helping us to believe more fully in ourselves. This can be done by the leader regularly pushing us to recognize our successes and achievements to help us believe we are stronger than we think we are. We do, in fact, often need to be pushed to recognize our successes because we are often perversely more inclined to see only our setbacks and failings.

Leadership selection processes can be counterproductive with regard to promoting facilitative skills.? With leadership selection being competitive, it is too readily a celebration of the heroic individual, the ability of one person to come across as a genuine heroic leader. Organizations structured as hierarchies also drive us to look for the heroic individual leader.

We need to shift gears, firstly, in recognition that partnerships are so much more important today than going it alone and, secondly, by seeing that active facilitation skills are the best way to fully engage teams, as well as partners, to create shared ownership and deeper commitment to agreed decisions. Active facilitation skills can be effective in building consensus with partners and, as a leadership style, to more fully engage and motivate teams.

Whenever leaders use authority to command certain actions in their teams (other than in a crisis), disempowerment is a highly likely side effect. As role models, top level leaders effectively give leaders at all lower levels permission to use authority too and skip the engaging leadership approach.

(See my article “The Engaging Leader” for more on this style of leadership.)