The Partnership Brokers Association

The October edition of Stories from Practice explores how partnership brokering relates to leadership.

Accredited partnership broker STUART KINSELLA from Australia shares an in-depth analysis of leadership qualities and how these qualities are tied to the attributes of partnership brokering. He further outlines how he applied these in his professional practice, and how leadership qualities can nurture the success of a partnership.

“The contribution made by a good partnership broker, particularly an internal partnership broker, can often be overlooked and/or is undervalued. However, there are strong parallels between the qualities demonstrated by a good partnership broker and key attributes of leadership. For example, the best leaders lead through influence, not the power of their position, and they are open to new ideas, criticisms and different perspectives. This paper argues that a good partnership broker has extensive leadership capabilities and can therefore frame their ‘offering’ (ie their skills and expertise) in this context.”

Download Stuart’s paper here. Tell us how you improve and enhance your leadership skills and how this impacts your collaborative work. Twitter @PBA_Brokers using #partnershipbrokers.

Is it true that, ‘It’s much harder to build trust without meeting in person’? Perhaps we have a new opportunity to do ‘business as unusual’ and to disrupt the patterns we found ourselves working in that didn’t feel equitable or effective.
Watch the recording of our third Global Dialogue on Partnership to explore with Catherine Russ, who created the prototype for PBA’s ‘Brokering Partnerships Remotely’ certificate course, the disruptive potential offered by remote dynamics in partnerships. Get motivated to try some new things!

In the September edition of Stories from Practice we invited PBA accredited partnership broker Dulani Sirisena to share her paper with our global community.

Dulani explores the relationship between donors and beneficiaries, and how both sides can move beyond the transactional nature of a funding relationship toward extracting greater value and impact. While not all partners have to be ‘equal’, it is key to seek equity in the partnership.

Dulani provides insights from her own practical experience with DFAT programmes in Sri Lanka and offers pointers as to how mutuality and reciprocity can be achieved. Not least also asking the question, whether to partner with all the consequences of mutuality, reciprocity and sharing risks, costs and benefits, or not to partner and instead focus on providing funds in the most effective way possible.

“In today’s world of complex development challenges, such as the global crisis we are facing right now, it is no longer enough for donors to play a passive role in the development equation. A broader understanding within the development community is required of the value-add a donor can provide beyond funding. This paper shares lessons on common partnering challenges from the Australian Community Rehabilitation Program in Sri Lanka, and the application of key partnering principles to resolve them. It explores the critical role of a bilateral donor in building and supporting effective partnerships.”

Download Dulani Sirisena’s paper here and tell us about your insights on working with donors on Twitter @PBA_Brokers using #partnershipbrokers.

The Certificate in Brokering Partnerships Remotely is a five week course delivered online. If you are a partnership practitioner operating remotely and you would like to: explore the issue; build insights and confidence; develop practical approaches suitable for your context and earn a CERTIFICATE in Brokering Partnerships Remotely, you are welcome to join one of the upcoming cohorts:

• Global cohort: 21 October – 18 November – course in progress
  
• Oceania & South Asia cohort new dates tbc
• Americas cohort: Spring 2021

To get more information and register for the course please visit the Remote Partnering website.

Our next session of the Global Dialogues on Partnership is on 1 September. Free bookings at: https://bit.ly/scalingpartnerships

Our special guest will be Accredited Partnership Broker, Ian Gray, who will unpack years of experience working with diverse partners, navigating partnerships along the innovation continuum and grappling with questions like:

–  How do you ensure the partnerships are fit for purpose for the right stage

–  What does fit for purpose partnership look like? And what does your approach need to be

– What happens to small start-up innovators, partnering with larger, established organisations, as they move towards scale?

– Scaling: Can you hold it together when partnerships turn from being transformational to being transactional?

Join host Michelle Halse, for this 90 min conversation, to learn from Ian Gray’s vast experience, and share your own experiences and challenges. Perhaps together we can redraw the map of partnering for innovation!

When: 1 September 2020, 12:00 – 13:30 London,  7:00 – 8:30 Ottawa,  8:00 – 9:30 Sao Paulo,  14:00 – 15:30 Nairobi,  16:30 – 18:00 New Delhi,  21:00 – 22:30 Canberra,  23:00 – 0:30 Wellington

Excited about this session? Share it with your networks using this LinkedIn announcement or the registration link https://bit.ly/scalingpartnerships .

About Ian Gray: Ian is the Founder of Gray Dot Catalyst, a strategy, innovation and partnering consultancy. He is an author and speaker who has provided advisory, mentoring, training and facilitation services to over 70 businesses, charities, multilateral organisations and governments. He has brokered and supported numerous innovation partnerships through the different phases of the innovation cycle. Ian is a patented inventor and holds an M.A. (Hons), MSc (Econ), M.B.A. and is currently studying for a PhD in Strategic Innovation. He is an Accredited Partnership Broker, member of the PBA board, and a Fellow of the RSA.

References:

1. Better Together: How startups and the third sector can collaborate (Charlotte Reypens, Christopher Haley, Gwil Purchase; Nesta &Save the Children)
2. Partnerships Review: Humanitarian Innovation Fund (ELRHA)
3. Frameworks for Approaching Collaboration within the Humanitarian Sector (Dan McClure & Hannah Reichardt, Save the Children)

The shift from face-to-face contact to working-remotely has invited all of us to explore how we can continue to collaborate effectively. Investing in the partnering process and bringing presence to the question of what is needed next is as important as before. The difference is, we are asked to create spaces for these processes online and/ or over the phone.

In this edition of Stories from Practice we invited Accreditation alumni Lauren Flaherty to share her paper on communicating in a virtual world. She recently also completed the Brokering Partnerships Remotely course exploring the benefits and challenges of this new paradigm and what it means to use virtual communication more consciously when elements of context, gestures, body language and eye contact are reduced or even removed.

“Are you feeling overwhelmed by the increase in virtual communication? After generations of honing our face-to-face communication skills, we are sophisticated ‘readers’ of others; their meaning, intentions and potential to help, or harm us. The rich nature of traditional communication feeds our need to ‘fill in the blanks’ of what people are saying, reaching deeper into the meaning behind the words. Virtual communication is sterile, and if not used consciously, can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust and conflict. This paper will get you thinking about communication – and how to make the most of virtual communication, while avoiding some of the pitfalls!”

Read Lauren’s paper here let us know what you have learned in your journey of partnering remotely using #partnershipbrokers on Twitter.

Partnerships for the Goals: Is it time to reframe SDG 17 so it’s fit for transformation?

You can now watch the recording of the first in our series of Global Dialogues on Partnership.
SDG 17 – does it reflect an old paradigm of international cooperation? Of donor-recipient relations? Of developed-developing countries? Does it give primacy to economic growth? Why does it represent a narrow conceptualisation of partnerships, and use language that is contradictory to the language of transformation throughout Agenda 2030?

To watch please click here.

In this edition of Stories from Practice, we share a paper produced by PBA Accreditation Alumni Donna Leigh Holden.

Australia-based Donna works in International Development and decided to focus her mentored reflective practice on her engagement with civil society partnerships in Asia and the Pacific.

She explores how aid effectiveness frameworks are applied in civil society partnerships and how such frameworks impact structural challenges around equity, transparency and mutual benefit.

Drawing on her experience and observations in this field, she brings examples of how partnership brokers can help partners navigate complexity and address potential structural challenges.

‘Development partnerships are not only an end, but an important means for working with this complexity. There are however perverse incentives and structural inequities in play within the development industry that makes this challenging. This paper explores a few of these inequities and proposes that good partnerships for development require moving beyond shared objectives and necessitate a wide-ranging set of reforms which shift the way that different development actors do business.’

Download Donna’s paper here and tell us about your experiences when working wihthin effectiveness frameworks in the International Development sector via Twitter   #partnershipbrokers.

The Certificate in Brokering Partnerships Remotely is a five week course delivered online. If you are a partnership practitioner operating remotely and you would like to: explore the issue; build insights and confidence; develop practical approaches suitable for your context and earn a CERTIFICATE in Brokering Partnerships Remotely, you are welcome to join one of the upcoming cohorts:

• Americas cohort: 14 October – 12 November
• Europe, Africa, Middle East & South Asia cohort: 21 October – 18 November
  
• Oceania & South Asia cohort – week of 19 October – 16 November 2020

To get more information and register for the course please visit the Remote Partnering website.

How does partnership brokering fit into the colorful and ever-changing landscape of collaborative approaches? Our September paper examines this question through the lens of an internal partnership broker.

During her Accreditation period, KATHY GALE, Executive Director for the US-based non-profit organization Eras Senior Network, was leading efforts on a complex multi-stakeholder partnership aiming to deliver a national service program. Using Collective Impact as a framework to guide the process, she explored how introducing partnership brokering principles, and making the role of a partnership broker explicit, influenced the outcome of the Collective Impact process.

Well-intentioned efforts to solve complex community issues with Collective Impact processes risk failure without sufficient attention paid to the formation and management of the partnership. Communities throughout the US have eagerly embraced Collective Impact as a framework for their work. However, without sufficient attention paid to the foundation and development of the partnership, these groups are ripe for the collapse of relationships, hurt feelings, wasted resources, and worst of all, not making progress on the very issue they are seeking to address.  This paper submits that the role of a Partnership Broker is integral in bringing a disciplined method and proven philosophy to the formation and maturation of a partnership, helping to create conditions favorable for using sophisticated processes such as Collective Impact.

Read Kathy’s story here. How did you apply partnership brokering when working with different collaborative frameworks? In what ways did it benefit the process? Share your experiences with us on Twitter #partnershipbrokers.

More Stories from Practice.

This edition of Stories from Practice takes us to Nepal where in spring 2015 devastating earthquakes killed thousands of people and destroyed over 750,000 homes and vital infrastructure.

Arthi Patel was appointed by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs to support the UNDP in their provision of humanitarian disaster relief. The paper outlines how Arthi, in her role as donor representative and partnership broker, helped the earthquake recovery project to succeed amidst the urgency of delivering rapid relief action and tensions between partner organisations.

In the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes Arthi worked for DFAT and UNDP to assist 14,000 micro-entrepreneurs recover their livelihoods. This was a high-pressure environment with strained relationships and high expectations. Arthi fostered an adaptive management approach, and with the support of her PBA mentor trialled different forms of brokering, collaboration and reflection. A focus on a higher purpose of recovery for micro-entrepreneurs helped people to break through bureaucratic and institutional hurdles. The paper describes how collaborative practice was fostered and came to be valued by all parties in a pressured environment.

Read Arthi Patel’s paper here and share your comments via Twitter using #partnershipbrokers. 

Before many of us dive into the festive season break next week, we are presenting you with a new edition of our knowledge sharing initiative Stories from Practice.

Mary Frankham from New Zealand is sharing the insights of her PBA Accreditation learning journey as a partnership broker for the North-West Wildlink Partnership Group. In her role Mary explored the dynamics of being the project manager of a partnership, while also having the remit to represent a voice that is independent from any of the partners involved, a dual role of sorts.

There has been a lot written about the many functions of a partnership broker, but few discuss how to balance these demands with day-to-day expectations. Some brokers are required to coordinate and manage partnership projects, and brokering is expected to happen on the side. There are positive and negative aspects to one person being both, project manager and partnership broker. Most importantly, this person must step in and out of each of their roles at the right moment, articulate these dual responsibilities to the partnership, and mitigate negative consequences such as partner dependency.

Read Mary Frankham’s paper here. If you would like to share your comments with the author or us, please email learning@partnershipbrokers.org, or tweet about your views and experiences using #partnershipbrokers

In September we launched a new knowledge sharing initiative – Stories from Practice – publishing compelling papers which examine the realities of partnership brokering, and how practitioners navigate these to help partnerships progress and achieve transformation. These papers have been created by alumni of the PBA Accreditation Programme as part of their learning journey.

Continuing the launch theme of the art & science of partnership brokering, we have invited PBA Accreditation alumni Kate Hayes to share her paper which reflects on intuition as the art of brokering.

This paper argues that partnership brokering can be strengthened through both a science and an art orientation and explores how creative discernment – intuition – has been critical to the author’s art of brokering.  Throughout the partnership process the broker is responsible for shape-shifting from coach to facilitator to mediator to challenger to finisher. This shape shifting requires active and rational discernment. At key transition points in the partnering process, however, the author also learnt the value of ceding the rational and the scientific to allow her intuition to instruct and to inform.  Two case studies are provided that illustrate how at certain times a different way of seeing and discerning – an intuitive way – can lead to surprising and positive outcomes for the partnerships at hand.

Read Kate Hayes’ paper here. If you would like to share your comments with the author or us, please email learning@partnershipbrokers.org.

You can now access the recording of the webinar with FSG Managing Director Adeeb Z. Mahmud and PBA Associates from Australia and Canada, Michelle Halse, Julie Mundy and Jocelyne Daw on how partnerships can maximize shared value business strategies for transformational results. The discussion was held on 7th November 2018 with nearly 50 participants. The recording is available here.