I have just completed a 2 day workshop with a great group of partnership managers. Here is what I learned!
- Get really clear and comfortable about your self interest. Your personal reaction to the opportunities and possibilities offered in your role.
- Communicate this powerfully in language that the recipient will understand and value.
- Develop your professional self interest – the overlap between your individual/personal and professional/organisational response to what REALLY matters.
- Build your power to influence what really matters through investing in person to person relationships. Invest in a series of 121s. Share what really matters to you. Be clear on how they will perceive you.
- Use the allies/opponents/adversaries/fencesitters/bedfellows model to help you structure this.
- Become power hungry (why wouldn’t you want power to make what you believe in happen? Don’t leave power for the bad guys of this world to grab!)
- Building a powerful coalition around your ideas inside the business is as important as building one externally.
- Know your reputation – find ways to find what people REALLY think of you and your agenda – but are too polite to say!
- Don’t be busy fools. Work on the most powerful relationships. That is the relationships that give you the most power – this has little or nothing to do with the ‘authority’ power of the other party. Think leverage. Think goals.
- Think ‘enlightened self interest‘ and here.
- Ring fence thinking time – 2 lots of 90 minutes a week – to develop your agenda – rather than respond to the needs and agendas of others. This will increase your sense of control and reduce your levels of stress – as well as making you much more effective and creative. GUARANTEED.
- Agree on the ends. Be different, challenging, creative and risky when it comes to the means. You don’t always have to play by the rules. Think Mandela.
- If you play by the rules of bureaucracy it will find ways of stifling change.
- Don’t let years of socialisation in being helpful and humble result in you being a selfless partner. Nobody wants to partner with Uriah Heep – but they may just take everything you have.
- Resist the safety of bureaucracy – maintenance, safety, dependency (external locus of control).
- Pursue the entrepreneurial way – greatness, courage and autonomy (internal locus of control).
- Don’t waste too much time and energy on the difficult people. Invest it in those who share your self interest – life is just better that way.
- Always take your own chalk and be cautious in your selection of cues….(this is not a mystical metaphor – just a statement of fact).
Anything I have missed?
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung