At COMET Auckland, we have a set of principles that underpin the way we work.  One of them is “never alone”.

Susan Warren CEO COMET Auckland

At COMET Auckland, we have a set of principles that underpin the way we work.  One of them is “never alone”, meaning that every project we undertake is always a collaboration or partnership of some sort.  This is a choice, and also a necessity – there’s no way a small organisation like COMET Auckland can have all the expertise needed to achieve our big goals for education and skills in Auckland, without teaming up with other organisations that are moving in the same direction.

Sometimes our collaborations are simple, short-term processes, such as bringing together a committee of practitioners to organise a one-off workshop.  Other times they’re more complex, like creating a long-term partnership between a tertiary provider, a school, an early childhood service and a community organisation to support a group of parents through their first-ever qualification. 

Either way, there are some basics that we’ve found are essential to making it work – for us, for our partners and most importantly, for the people we’re trying to serve.  I call them basics because they sound obvious and we all think we do them naturally, but what we’ve found through hard experience is they take real focus and effort to do well – and that’s what it takes to get real gains from collaboration.

I’m sure you have your own list of keys to collaboration – here’s ours:

Before you start:

Before beginning a collaborative project, it’s worth stepping back and asking some hard questions together, so everyone has the same expectations, roles are clear and obvious risks are identified and mitigated.  Here are a few things to sort out up-front, to reduce hassles later:

• Agreeing goals and outcomes – common ground on these is an absolute essential, so just walk away if you can’t agree on at least one or two jointly-valued goals
• Being clear about budgets – this doesn’t mean total transparency, it just means each organisation knowing reasonably accurately what the work will cost them and what funding they have or need
• Clarifying roles – which organisation is responsible for which parts of delivery, who owns what intellectual property, who can say what to media and stakeholders, who makes which decisions, and how you’ll reach joint decisions
• Talking through contingencies – what happens if the funding is cut, if one partner wants to publish research, if the partnership ends…
• Writing all this down – either in a formal contract/MOU or at least in a project plan or meeting minutes

Remember though, you can never anticipate everything, so be prepared to make adjustments to all this as you go along.

Staying on track:

However well you set things up, there will be ups and downs along the way.  Staying the course and achieving collective outcomes is all about focus, persistence and trust.  In my experience, these three are all inter-related, and trust is the centre – it’s often the hardest to achieve, but if it’s lacking, everything else falls apart.  Trust doesn’t happen automatically or quickly, and it takes work.  Here are my thoughts on how to build trust, and simultaneously develop an effective collaboration:

• Focus on the “main thing” –regularly bring everyone back to the outcomes you’re collectively trying to achieve, and ground every decision first and foremost around what’s best for the people you’re all trying to serve.
• Demonstrate impact – measure progress towards outcomes and get feedback from participants as you go along, so decisions can be evidence-based, achievements can be celebrated and any issues can be identified and addressed early.
• Communicate – keep all partners informed about every aspect of the project, bring differences into the open, and operate a “no surprises” policy, especially around risks or bad news.
• Be flexible – be open to compromising, changing plans, and altering your usual way of doing things, to fit with changing circumstances or partners’ needs, provided that the changes don’t compromise outcomes.
• Respect each other – recognise each others’ area of expertise, treat partners with courtesy, take time to know each other as human beings, be sensitive to culture, see things from the other person’s viewpoint, and assume good intentions unless absolutely proven otherwise.
• Be dependable – deliver on what you say you’ll do (or let people know in advance if you can’t), fulfill your role with commitment and excellence, stay calm and focused in the face of change.
• Be persistent – hang in there through setbacks and work together to solve each problem as it comes, no matter how many problems arise.  Be prepared to do “whatever it takes” to bring about positive outcomes for the people you’re serving.

After all this, you may be asking “why bother”?  The answer, from our experience, is that the results you get from collaboration are absolutely worth the effort, and as a bonus, all organisations in the partnership benefit through learning from one another.  Yes it’s hard, but we wouldn’t have it any other way!

For more detail on what it takes to make collaboration work, see the recent paper by Kail and Abercrombie (2013) – “Collaborating for impact: Working in partnership to boost growth and improve outcomes”

Website: www.cometauckland.org.nz