Facilitating Organizational Partnerships

Today, organizations are under pressure to address increasingly complex problems, adapt to rapid changes in technology, work faster, and produce more with limited resources. In response to these demands many are combining resources and expertise with other organizations. Partnerships, mergers, joint ventures, and other types of organizational alliances are being formed, dissolved, and re-formed at an unprecedented pace. However, simply deciding to "join forces" is no guarantee of success. If organizations don't pay careful attention to why they are coming together and how to make their partnership work, there is a strong possibility that the endeavor will fail.

TRG has extensive experience helping organizations to partner successfully. We provide training programs that build partnership skills and work with partnerships that are just forming, those that have gone awry and require assistance in getting back on track, and those that have existed for awhile but are looking to change direction. Our assistance to partnerships includes the following elements:

• Clarifying Expectations - We help the organizations entering a partnership to develop a shared understanding of the goals they hope to achieve and how to achieve them. We also help them to reach a better understanding of the commitments they are making - what the contribution of each will be, and how they will share both the risks and the rewards.
• Starting Off Successfully - The initial stages of a partnership are critical. TRG helps alliances get off on the right foot by facilitating a process in which partners focus on how they will work together. This includes the establishment of agreements on who will play what role, who is responsible for key results, how decisions will be made and how progress will be measured. By focusing on these issues at the beginning, many of the problems common to inter-organizational partnerships can be avoided or minimized.
• Sustaining High Performance - TRG services help partnerships sustain a high level of performance over time. We help the organizations to step away from the day to day demands of the work to re-focus on a strategic and longer-term perspective. We provide a forum for partners to return to the original agreements and to discuss openly what is working and where improvements are needed.
• Finishing Strong - Very often, little attention is paid to the final stages of a relationship. TRG helps partnerships to plan together how they will bring matters to a close, maintain productivity through the final activities, and celebrate success. This can make a significant impact in how the partners feel about the working relationship, and importantly, how they respond when the next opportunity arises.