How Our Organization Recognizes " Six Partnering Attributes "

Six Partnering Attributes that we hold!

Our Six Partnering Attributes are a behavior-based system that results in an environment conducive to building trust and creating mutual beneficial relationships. One must be fluid in all six attributes in order to reap the benefits of trusting business relationships, since the six attributes build on and reinforce each other.

The Six Partnering Attributes make up your Partnering Intelligence and are the foundation of building a partnering atmosphere, or Partnering Culture, within an organization. The six attributes include:

* Self-Disclosure and Feedback
* Win/Win Orientation
* Ability to Trust
* Future Orientation
* Comfort with Change
* Comfort with Interdependence

How well do you disclose information to each other?

Can you give important feedback comfortably?

Are conversations open and direct in your business?

Do you feel like people withhold information?

Do you have difficulty telling someone something?

Do people point fingers rather than communicate?

Self-Disclosure and Feedback

Communication is the life-blood of any organization. Communication is critical to healthy relationships, and how we communicate is just as important as what we say.

The ability to disclose relevant information, share personal and business experiences, and provide honest, direct and timely feedback is critical to closing the communication loop.

Self-disclosure and feedback are foundation skills that not only energize organizational life but build trust in the process.



Is your organization creating losers?

Is conflict simmering just under the surface of your business?

How do you deal with office bullies?

Are you losing the input of your talent because of disagreements?

Do disagreements prevent your organization from moving forward?

Are people in your workplace angry?

Win/Win Orientation

Getting to the win builds trust and frees-up communication. We are all hardwired to react to disagreements based on both our DNA and our early conditioning. This stimulus is predicated on the fact that we want to protect ourselves from threats. As with all living beings, our instinctual options are fight or flight.

However, we can move away from our inherent style to one based on reason, needs, and communication through the use of the Negotiator style. To do this successfully, we must recognize our own inherent style and during times of emotional duress move to the learned style. Only then can we build trust with others and not create losers in the process.



Do your managers trust your employees?

Do your employees trust your managers?

Do your partners trust you?

Do you trust your partners?

Ability to Trust

Trust is the foundation of all relationships. Without trust, there is no communication. Without trust there is no win/win. Trust is the basis for all healthy and productive relationships. It is also the key to enabling others and yourself to use the Six Partnering Attributes effectively.

Without trust, you cannot have creativity, innovation or risk-taking; and employee loyalty goes right out the door, resulting in higher retention cost and poor morale. Trust is the only partnering attribute that is both an input into the relationship as well as an outcome of its use.



"We've tried that before and it didn't work."

"Don't give the project to him. He's always late."

"We can't do that. They don't know the system limitations."

"I don't trust her to represent my point of view."

Future Orientation

Do you ever hear these kinds of comments in your workplace? If so, perhaps your organization is infected with a past orientation. Leaders, employees, and organizations that continue to look to the past to make future decisions will find themselves mired in the past.

Whether we are talking about business processes, systems, or each other, past orientation tends to demoralize people and can create a negative pall over an entire organization. This is especially true when leadership, managers, or supervisors embrace a past orientation.

Looking to the future, establishing needs, and then holding each other accountable for the negotiated results are the hallmarks of a future-oriented organization. How well does your business do?

Read our article about Future Orientation versus past orientation occurring in one of the world's leading companies.

"I am just burned out on all this change!"

"Why are they changing it again? It works just fine."

"Every time they change something, it gets worse!"

"I don't want to change. I like it just the way it is."

"They change just for the sake of changing."

Comfort with Change

What is your change style? Are you a resistor, adaptor or an initiator? Do you personally embrace change and the opportunities it brings, or do you resist change?

Change is constant and will not go away. If anything, it will only accelerate over time. Initiating too much change is as deadly to a business as resisting change. What's the right balance?

Understanding your change style, your change resistors and having strategies in place to manage change is a key to building trust with others and getting new and innovative opportunities to the workplace.





Are your team meetings non-productive?

Do you feel like you're spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere?

Do your people seem more concerned about protecting themselves than helping others?

Do some people just go away and lock themselves in their offices, shunning others?

Comfort with Interdependence


Finding the balance between teamwork and individual contribution can be difficult, especially in today's complex organizational life where no one person, department, or organization has all the solutions.

Do your employees feel a duty to help each other's success?

Internal partners, people who work together within an organization, form the most important partnerships a business can have. Getting them to not only work together well but to have a duty to help each other's success is a rare event in businesses around the world.

Comfort with interdependence helps conceptualize how we can be independent enough to contribute our own talents to the team and dependent enough to trust others to do their part in the process. It's a tough balance but, when it occurs, the magic of synergy happens.

"Le future simple"

The Second Time Around
By Kathleen Goolsby

“Love is lovelier the second time around . . .” or so claims the lyrics in the Sammy Cahn song, “The Second Time Around,” recorded by Frank Sinatra and dozens of others. In reality, this sentiment often proves untrue when it comes to partnering relationships. I have studied hundreds of outsourcing relationships for their keys to success and their root causes of failure. Simply put, in a failed relationship, the parties did not establish up front a partnering mind-set and behaviors before they began working together.
Failure then starts to evidence itself in relationship characteristics such as the service provider’s inflexibility in working with the client’s changing business needs; the client feeling the provider nickels-and-dimes the client at nearly every step; and neither party trusting each other to do what they promised, or to communicate openly and honestly, or to be committed to each other’s success. Not limited to just outsourcing business models, these characteristics also show up in other types of failing partnering relationships.
A new partnering relationship that follows on the heels of a prior failed relationship is often more challenging than the one just ended. That’s because, when things go wrong in a relationship, it’s natural to blame the partner for the problems and not look at ourselves as part of the underlying cause. This mistaken perspective leads to a decision to establish the new relationship in a framework of constraints designed to prevent the new partner from possibly repeating behaviors that occurred in the first relationship. In doing so, we make the first mistakes in the new relationship: we make decisions from a past orientation and we don’t establish a foundation of trust with the new partner. Hence, we eliminate two of the Six Partnering Attributes, which are essential building blocks for success; so we set up the new partnering relationship for failure.
Sure, we are to learn from our errors in life and do better the second time around. But in a partnering relationship, the second effort cannot be filled with constraints based on the unsatisfactory performance of a past relationship. This strategy simply “overmedicates” the symptoms (the other party’s behaviors) of a prior failed relationship, does nothing to prevent the underlying problem from occurring again, and sets the stage for failure in a slightly different flavor from the prior relationship.
Obviously, organizations want the second relationship to succeed, but they seldom understand what this success requires. First of all, it requires trust, not chains of constraint. It is also important to talk about trust up front, before the seeds of failure have already germinated.
Here are four Partnering Intelligence guidelines for steps to take up front that will put the organizations in a position to walk together on a path to success:
1. Talk about trust. Both parties need to come to a mutual understanding or definition of trust. They need to discuss exactly what trust means to them and how it will be demonstrated in each other’s behavior.
2. Talk about the prior failure. The party that just experienced a failed relationship should not hide that fact from the new partner. The best practice is to inform the new partner that it just exited a bad relationship. Together they should discuss the things that caused the prior failure and mutually establish some mechanisms to ensure those things do not happen in the new relationship.
3. Ensure the partnership framework includes a mechanism for effective self-disclosure and feedback. Both of these behaviors build open, honest communication, which is a hallmark of effective partnerships and essential to success. It also helps in building trust.
4. Establish mechanisms for enforcing trust. The new partners need to talk about and negotiate into their relationship management structure one or more mechanisms that will facilitate and enforce their agreement to demonstrate trusting behaviors and to discuss them again, as needed.
Summing up these guidelines, the parties must be willing to engage in trusting behaviors up front and enforce them on an ongoing basis. It’s in their best interests to do so. Trust is crucial to building a mutually beneficial relationship that will remain strong enough to operate flexibly and collaboratively through challenges and opportunities that arise. Both parties must also be willing to talk about trust at the point in time when their behaviors fail to demonstrate trust, ensuring the discussion ends in a win-win manner with a re-alignment of their interests and a renewal of their commitment to mutual success.