The Partnership Challenge Part 3: “Challenge the Process”

We recently read The Leadership Challenge by James M Kouzes and Barry Z 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 3: The Partnership Challenge - Challenge the Process

There’s a Steve Jobs quote I recently came across that goes something like this, “Many companies like to compare themselves to their competitors. At Apple, we don’t position ourselves as better than any other company, we like to think of ourselves as just doing it differently.” Now, many die-hard Steve Jobs fans might cringe in how bad I quoted the above line, but I think this quote encapsulates what Kouzes and Posner encourage leaders to do. It’s not about comparison for better, but encouraging teams and businesses to look at doing things different.

And as partner leaders, we, too, have an opportunity to challenge the process of how we do business and how partnerships have been run in the past. 

It goes without saying that partnerships is not a new go-to-market motion. Channel, strategic partnerships, MSP, agencies, these are not new institutions in the last 10 years. In one form or another they’ve existed as a strategy to help customers choose, buy, or grow with the products and companies they work with. What has changed is the focus—especially in the last few years post the post-pandemic explosion.

Many companies who grew “without limits” in the post-Covid expansion have now responded to the contracting market by layoffs and cutting balance sheets. Future projections are retracted as many leaders attempt to respond to where the market could be going. But as many leaders know, we have to keep growing. If you don’t keep growing, your business eventually will die. 

So they turn to partnerships as a way to grow. It’s a new opportunity. Or as Kosner and Pouzes share, “Delivering results beyond expectations can’t be achieved with good intentions. People, processes, systems, and strategies all need to change. In addition, all change requires that leaders actively seek ways to make things better—to grow, innovate, and improve.”

To many, partnerships is the new opportunity.

Partnerships provides the opportunity for companies to grow through resellers without needing to invest in the headcount. Partnerships gives product owners the opportunity to innovate with their products through integrations rather than with engineering time and cost. Partnerships gives customer success teams the ability to outsource and provide a white-glove onboarding experience through agencies, MSPs, and system integrators.

So the time is right for partnerships to shine. 

Just as businesses are taking the opportunity to invest in partnerships, so partner leaders need to reevaluate their own business processes and systems so they can grow their companies. This is where we can collaborate with other partnership leaders in other organizations, learn from the thought leaders, and, most importantly, experiment and try new risks.

“You can’t achieve anything new or extraordinary by doing things the way you’ve always done them.” - Kouzes and Posner

As leaders, seizing the opportunity before us, we have an invitation to try something new and really help our companies grow through our partnerships. This will take a special kind of person, someone who we can all learn and grow into being—someone who challenges the process by seizing the opportunity and trying something new.

Have you tried something new in partnerships recently? Or are you doing what you’ve always done hoping for a different result?