The Partnership Challenge Part 2: “Inspire A Shared Vision"

Written by Danny Porter | Apr 4, 2024 4:45:00 PM

We recently read The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner at CoPort. We believe that if we’re not constantly learning, we’ll constantly find ourselves reacting rather than preparing, following rather than leading. And though there are times to follow, we’re pushing forward.

So we invite you to come along with us. What partnership teams need more than anything right now is not another playbook or tool, though we advocate for using the right tools for the right job. We advocate, more than anything, for growth and professional development. It’s been said that 15% of your job is the technical know-how, and the other 85% is all about people. We are in the people business first and foremost.

Yes, the contract matters, and the system makes a difference (or else we wouldn’t be in business). But when we put the technical and the system above the people, we’re missing the mark of living to our highest potential.

More than anything, we need leadership.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s 6th edition is a powerful collection of stories and time-tested truths. John Maxwell, arguably one of the world’s primary leadership experts says this, “The Leadership Challenge remains one of the five best books I have ever read. Thirty years after its first publication, I still continually recommend it to others looking to improve as leaders.”

With that being said, we’ll unpack the five practices of leadership and apply them to our work in partnerships. Because we know, that our companies win when our partnerships get better.

Let’s dive in:

Part 2: The Partnership Challenge - Inspire a Shared Vision

As we read through this second practice, we couldn’t help but see the connection between Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you’ve followed us along the journey this year, you’ll recollect we adapted those 7 Habits for life as a Partner Manager. You can read them here. As we’re growing in leadership, a shift that always takes place is the short term vision for the now to the long term vision for the future. It’s a challenging leap for many of us. For the early days of our career we are given tasks and must “do the work,” but when we step into leadership we’re being asked to think long term.

And the higher we grow in an organization, we get paid less for the short term, and paid more for the long term. Sometimes it feels disconcerting to begin to think beyond the week, the quarter, or the current year.

That’s why we need a vision, and not only have our own vision, but then communicate that to the people entrusted to our care.

Kouzes and Posner share it this way, “You begin with the end in mind by imagining what might be possible. Finding a common purpose inspires people to want to make that vision a reality.” Ring a bell? That’s habit number two: Start with the end in mind.

It’s a quote we like to remind ourselves of a lot around here, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” Yogi Berra.

As leaders, it’s our jobs to communicate the vision for our teams. As partner leaders? That’s right, we must set a vision for the future of the partner program, but also for each partner we’re investing in. Too many times we think of our partnerships as too small.

"That’s why we need a vision, and not only have our own vision, but then communicate that to the people entrusted to our care."

Here’s what I mean. You meet a new partner leader at another organization and you’re trying to agree to a partnership, maybe a reseller, referral, affiliate, integration, strategic, etc. You’re thinking through how it might work out and how it might fit. But have you stopped and considered where the future of the partnership could go? Is it just for leads? That’s pretty short term thinking. What if it could mean more? What if it could a whole new product? What if your company eventually acquired them? What if they acquired you?

This happened with one of the partnerships I was getting to know early on in my partnership career. They were an ISV and they had incredible potential and value from multiple angles in our partnership strategy. This other company could help us get into a new route to market and they had a use case we simply couldn’t solve for. We were much larger than them, so we opened up new markets and expanded their reach as well. During our conversations there was a conversation of potential acquisition in the future, but that was only speculation, especially since I was no where near to that level of decision making or influence. It didn’t work out for us to figure out an integration at that time and conversations went quiet. Then, almost a year later, the announcement came, we had acquired their company! Unbeknownst to me, that initial conversation started a thread of more conversations that ended up in us acquiring the team and their technology. Amazing!

Here’s another story of how a partnership has become more than a technology integration. It was a slow to start partnership, we weren’t sure where the future could go, but I knew that the solution would solve a real problem. The value was there, we only needed to figure out our joint go to market strategy. I knew that over time it would be the incremental value our partnership strategy was looking for, but it didn’t take off right away. We weren’t thinking as long term back then, but looking back, we were playing a long term game with this specific partner. Fast forward to almost 4 years and my employer made a strategic investment in this partnership by investing in the partner! Now this partner is definitely part of a longer term vision.

These are only two examples. For us to really grow as partner leaders, we must build the muscle of building the vision and sharing an inspired vision.

In order for us to share a vision, we must first have a vision, which can be learned and gained through exercising creativity, imagining the possibilities, and then building your team around the purpose behind partnerships.

Maybe your partnerships won’t end up in an acquisition or strategic investment. Mine did. But there were many others that had a different purpose and a different goal.

Build a vision for the future impact of your partnership efforts, include your team in the process and begin to dream. Then get to work. Make sure the vision is clear and involves your team.

When we have a vision of where we’re going, and we go together, then we have the opportunity to make our companies better. We know our companies win when our partnerships get better.

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