Partner | Overcoming partnering difficulties

Clients

A construction company and an engineering organisation working together to deliver a contract.

Focus

The organisations were dependent on each other to deliver the contract to time and cost. They had agreed to partner to win the contract and were now experiencing difficulties with milestones being missed and costs starting to exceed budget.

Formulation

Twelve 1:1 interviews were held with a diagonal slice of each organisation – six in each organisation from finance, commercial, operational leaders and front line staff. The factors underpinning the difficulties were identified as:

• Lack of common understanding of the contract objectives
• Different processes and procedures operating in the two organisations
• Pace of work issues – different expectations
• Different leadership styles
• Poor meeting discipline with decisions not bottomed out

Intervention

Two 1 ½ day workshops were held – one with the executive teams of both organisation and one with the joint operational leaders and their teams. The teams were facilitated to work on:

• Gaining clarity about what the contract was actually set up to achieve – getting everyone on the same page
• Agreeing simple clear mechanisms for the way decisions were made and followed through
• Sharing expectations of the time needed to complete some tasks and agreeing how to communicate progress in both organisations
• Understanding the different personal styles of the leaders in the two organisations – what they needed from each other as people and what got in the way
• Agreeing a joint process for dealing with disputes between staff or where there were differences of interpretation of instructions

One key outcome of the workshop was a universal briefing about the way forward conducted by pairings from both organisations at each point of interface of the organisations.

The workshops used research from the study of group behaviour, emotional intelligence and high performing teams to support leaders in their understanding of each other and what had been getting in the way of the organisations working together effectively.

Outcomes

Follow up meetings were held with the MD’s from each organisation and a partnership survey was conducted some six months after the intervention. Progress had been made overall indicated by:

• Positive results from the partnership survey – no areas were in the red zone
• The MD’s were seeing fewer reports of disagreements requiring their involvement
• Some key milestones in contract performance had been met
• A number of cross organisation teams had met together socially to consolidate relationships
• Minutes of key meetings showed that decisions were made and followed up with recorded outcomes