Skills and Training
‘Smarter Partnerships’ has developed a tool for taking stock of learning needs relating to partnership working. Visit www.lgpartnerships.com to identify your learning priorities or read through the suggested skills below.
These are aimed primarily at those working in local authorities, although they are also generic skills needed for working in any partnership.
Leadership
Trust
Learning
Managing for Performance
Leadership
Skills and knowledge for partnerships where partners share a common vision and harness their energies to achieve more than they could on their own.
Skills:
- Coalition building – helping partners come together on common ground
- Vision and consensus building – helping partners determine the difference they want to make and how to work towards it
- Communicating – expressing ideas and concepts, especially in lay terms; listening actively
- Consultation – asking others for their views and involving them openly in decision making
- Managing change
- Delegating – giving someone responsibility and authority to meet an objective
- Influencing
- Negotiating roles and contributions
- Assertiveness – sure of one’s own needs but willing to give to gain.
Knowledge:
- Needs and opportunities which provide the basis for common ground
- Policy and funding developments
- Partner roles, contributions, constraints, motivations
- Potential benefits, costs and risks for individual partners
- Forms of partnership added value – how partnerships can achieve more than partners acting individually: more, better, faster results
- Interdependencies between partner activities – how success for one partner depends on the actions of others
- How to overcome barriers to partner engagement and commitment
- Use of performance management systems to reinforce partnership – systems relating to how resources are allocated and how individual or organisational performance is rewarded.
Trust
Skills and knowledge for partnerships where partners are mutually accountable, share risks and rewards fairly, and behave in ways which support successful outcomes.
Skills:
- Building robust relationships - seeking to ensure that others don’t anticipate things which may not be delivered
- Managing expectations - encouraging genuine two-way communications and improved mutual understanding
- Promoting dialogue - listening actively, clarifying and checking understanding
- Listening - putting yourself in someone else’s shoes
- Empathy
- Managing disagreement and conflict
- Giving constructive feedback - soliciting views and keeping people informed, while minimising demands on time
- Managing communications - seeking to ensure that others don’t anticipate things which may not be delivered
- Coping with the unfamiliar and unexpected - encouraging genuine two-way communications and improved mutual understanding.
Knowledge:
- Group dynamics - how people behave in groups
- Cultures, values and ways of working of others
- How partners can hinder the contribution of others
- Forms of partnership agreement
- Methods to build the capacity of partners - formal and informal ways of helping partners play a full and effective role.
Learning
Skills and knowledge for partnerships where partners continuously seek to improve what they do in partnership
Skills:
- Problem solving / creative thinking
- Systems thinking - holistic understanding of forces which shape behaviour and outcomes – intended and unintended
- Networking - getting to know others and sharing information
- Diagnosing performance issues - identifying what gets in the way of greater success - and scope for improvement.
Knowledge:
- Benchmarking and process mapping techniques for analysing and comparing critical performance requirements
- Partnership review and evaluation
- How to promote learning in partnerships - formal and informal means of encouraging reflection and learning by doing
- Learning needs analysis - how to review individual and team development needs
- Facilitation techniques - methods to enable group learning and decision-making
- Powers, motivations, constraints, potential of other partners
- Nature and implications of the partnership life cycle - stages as partnerships develop and mature and how to help manage change.
Managing For Performance
Skills and knowledge for partnerships where partners put in place necessary practices and resources and manage change effectively.
Skills:
- Negotiating
- Entrepreneurial - identifying and realising opportunities
- Setting objectives and performance measures
- Project team building - applying partnership development principles to joint team working
- Project planning/ management - applying project management disciplines to joint projects.
Knowledge:
- Partnership structures - different models of partnership (formal and informal) and how these fit the partnership purpose
- Accountability mechanisms - how partners are accountable to each other and to local communities, funders, etc
- Functions required for successful performance - roles and tasks which partners need to carry out to achieve objectives
- Co-ordination methods - planning and programming for joint working
- Managing meetings - how to run different kinds of meetings to ensure objectives are met
- Partnership evaluation methods - how to assess partnership processes and impact
- Sources of financial and in-kind resources
- Ways of making better use of resources
- Collaborative use of ICT - applying ICT to enable partnership working and build common knowledge.
Contact us for more information about our partnership working by e-mailing: tony.jacobs@nottscc.gov.uk
