Does your partnership need a health check??

Partnering Health Check workshop

Keeping a partnership on track and delivering results is not easy. As partnering can take place over long periods of time and people come and go from the various partners it is easy for performance and delivery to drop. The partnership may even falter and fall over!

So how do you keep the partnership humming along and delivering over a long period of time. And how can the partners continue to work together effectively throughout the partnering process?

One very effective way of keeping your partnering on track is to conduct regular ‘health checks’. By this we mean a thorough review of how the partners are working together. Reflecting back on the partnering principles that have been discussed and agreed at the start of the partnering process and seeing if the partners are actually working together how they said they would.

A great way of achieving this health check is to schedule a workshop with all partners and use an independent facilitator. This will enable some deep questioning and ensure some rigour in the process.

As always questions are very powerful in this situation and here we provide some possible review questions to consider when conducting a health check:

  • Are we still partnering as per our agreed principles?

  • Do we do what we said we would do?

  • Are we being open and honest with our partners?

  • How accountable are we to each other?

  • Is there any information we need to share with our partners?

  • Are we communicating effectively between and within the partners and key stakeholder groups and being as transparent as we can?

  • Are our decision making processes working and are we providing the right level of leadership

  • Are we learning from our partnering with others?

  • Do we all share collective ownership of this partnership?

  • Is our governance structure still appropriate?

  • Have we still got the right organisations and people around the table?

These are just some examples of areas to be questioned in a health check workshop and there may be a number of others relevant to your context.

Above all a partnering health check' enables partners to assess where they are in the process, to determine what is working and what isn’t and then to make adjustments to get it back on track and ensure high performance.

If you would like to know more about conducting a health check for your partnership then contact us for more details and how we can assist.

 



Ian DixonComment