Partners Achieve Results

Partners Achieve Results


Duration: 2 days

Course Description: This is a two-day interactive workshop in which you focus on your own actual partnerships by looking at them through a series of different lenses and discussing them in large and small groups. You will gain most from the course if you have in mind at least one specific partnership that you wish to focus on developing further.

Like partnerships outside work, partnerships within organisations are as diverse as the people involved in them. You have the opportunity here to learn about how your colleagues develop their partnerships and to learn how you can further develop your own partnerships.

This course is NOT about influencing skills or about ‘getting your way’ on a particular issue; there are other courses that are more suitable if you wish to develop those particular skills.

Prerequisites: None

Objectives: By the end of this workshop, you will know how to build partnerships by:
• Recognising and understanding different communication approaches
• Recognising and understanding different organisational cultures
• Recognising and understanding different organisational values
• Recognising and understanding different problem-solving preferences
• Choosing a partnership strategy that builds on all these differences
• Working effectively with resistance
• Building on past successes and shared visions
• Developing a network of cooperative relationships

Content:

In this course you work with a Partnership model that helps you develop your partnerships by understanding the different ways people approach communication, problem-solving, values, and culture.

You learn this model with your colleagues in a series of experiential exercises and then you apply these learnings to four different partnership experiences.

1. Back-at-Work Partnership: This is an actual working partnership that you are intent on developing further. Working in a trio, you take turns applying the learnings from each full-group exercise to your own particular situation. The other two participants provide coaching by listening and asking questions.

2. Back-at-Life Partnerships: These are the other partnerships you are involved in both at wrork and in your life outside work. Working in the full group, you learn how your colleagues develop their partnerships and you discuss how the Partnership model applies to various situations.

3. Back-to-the-Future Partnerships: Working in pairs and quartets, you share stories of effective partnerships, identify crucial factors that contributed to that effectiveness, and envision even more effective future partnerships

4. Here-and-Now Partnerships: As you work with your colleagues on each of these other three partnerships (Back-at-Work, Back-at-Life, and Back-to-the-Future) you are involved in real-time partnerships. So in each working session, you pause to focus on what you are learning here and now about partnership with these partners.


Format:

The two days of the course contain about 15 hours of learning time. Of this 15 hours, you spend about three hours learning about models and theories, four hours doing exercises and discussing your learnings in the full group, two hours doing exercises and exchanging feedback with a partner, and six hours working in trios on your own actual partnership situations.