Team sports prepare boys for the corporate model of business. Girls, however, typically play closely with one or two friends. What great preparation for entrepreneurial partnership!
So it's fitting, as women continue to start businesses in record numbers, that many find partnership a comfortable format.
Partnership brings a variety of benefits, including a sense of connection and someone to cover for you when you go on vacation. On the other hand, many partnerships end in crisis and conflict.
To help you avoid failure, here are seven components of positive partnership:
1. Shared values. Partners need a sense of shared standards regarding what is desirable and good or undesirable and bad. These values will guide partners' actions, judgments and choices. Values, which often engender considerable emotion, range from valuing family, prosperity, ambition or a work ethic to valuing a political persuasion. Shared values keep partners united.
2. Complementary skills and traits. Successful partners will possess different skills and traits that complement one another. The broader the range of skills, the clearer the division of labor (and power). It may be easy to distinguish the marketing person from the technical person in a business, but other necessary variables are often not as easy to see.
Michael Gerber's classic book, The E-Myth, explains that a business owner needs to play three roles:
- Entrepreneur: the creative visionary
- Manager: the administrator who brings planning, order and predictability; and
- Technician: the craftsperson.
Partnerships have a distinct advantage in that two or more invested people are available to perform the three necessary roles.
3. Sense of equity. Equity occurs when the rewards of a relationship are proportional to what each side perceives as his or her contribution. Strangers and casual acquaintances maintain equity by keeping track of their benefits exchanges. In long-term and more committed relationships, however, it's not healthy to keep track. Instead, a sense of equity should be established. A perception of inequity (I am giving more then I get) takes a tremendous toll on a partnership.
4. Growing together. From the moment we are born until the day we die, we are growing and changing. Partners and their relationships are continuously undergoing change. Successful partners embrace change and growth, knowing that this attitude benefits both their individual and shared professional identities.
5. Proactive conflict management strategies. Successful partners will use proactive and strategic approaches to conflict management. Competing and avoiding are not effective conflict-management strategies for partners. Instead, wise partners will use accommodation, compromise and collaboration to resolve their differences.
6. Shared vision. Vision determines and expresses where an organization wants to go and how it intends to get there. A shared vision allows partners to focus on their goals and the methods they'll use to achieve those goals. When partners hold different visions, they become discouraged, overwhelmed and disconnected.
To create and benefit from a shared vision, four tasks are required:
- Create the initial vision.
- Translate that vision into the necessary physical actions.
- Articulate and sell the vision to others.
- Hold true to the essence of the vision when reality changes plans.
7. An exit strategy. Without an exit strategy in place, partners can be forced to make crucial decisions at a time when they are the least level-headed.
An exit strategy is a shared sense of when and how an alliance will end. An exit strategy should be included as the end point in a business plan. Four questions should be addressed when considering an exit plan:
- What events might trigger an end to the partnership?
- How will the business be valued at the end?
- Which options for future ownership are acceptable?
- What post-alliance ties and restrictions, such as non-compete clauses, need to be included?
Synergy is what happens when two or more people work together to create results that couldn't have been obtained by working independently. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's what partnership is all about.