Three keys to successful partnerships
Was Richard Branson right or is success about these three Cs?
Richard Branson is quoted as saying that one of the keys to success is when someone offers you a great opportunity and you’re uncertain whether or not you are up to the task, “Say yes and figure it out later”.
In 2018, I left the company that had grown to become Radisson Hotel Group. From being told during my initial interview for a security guard job that I was “too old, too educated, and had too many opinions”, I had advanced to become their global Vice President of Corporate Safety and Security. I had grown along with the company for 31 years. In 2018, I was also selected by IFSEC as the #1 global influencer in the security executives category. In other words, or in Richard Branson’s words; it looked like I had said yes to an opportunity and figured it out.
In reality, it wasn’t about me. I didn’t “say yes and figure it out”. What I did over the course of my corporate career, was learn the value of partnerships, and the ingredients of the most successful ones.
Partnering with people that could teach me what I needed to learn and with whom I could use my skillset to support was key to my career success, both within the company and externally.
The people I worked closest with internally had military or police backgrounds, I did not. Some of my colleagues had skills in protocol and diplomacy, I did not. Some of them had diplomas from hotel management schools, I did not. My strengths were in fields like psychology, organizational behaviour, strategy, and critical thinking. We complemented each other. We were partners more than we were boxes on a hierarchical organization chart.
Externally, partnering with government officials, NGO experts, corporate security counterparts and academics around the world opened up new opportunities to make our hotels and our communities better and safer places for people to gather.
My superiors didn’t always understand the benefit of engaging with the world outside our company. Someone once forwarded me a long chain of emails between senior executives. A small part of their discussion was relevant to my role, so the email was forwarded for me to take action, but the sender forgot to remove the chain below the part I needed to know. Further down in the discussion, there was a remark from a very senior leader in the company wondering what a security guy was doing engaging with people outside the company. “What’s in it for us? Is he looking to get hired somewhere else?”
In fact, external engagement was vital. It taught me things I didn’t know. It taught me what corporate client security and travel risk executives were concerned about in hotels and it gave us as a company the opportunity to show them how much we cared about them and their challenges of providing a duty of care to their travelling employees. People would be safer and more secure if we worked together.
External engagement also led to the formation of the OSAC Hotel and Lodging Security Committee which I was a founding member of in 2007. Last week, the current HLSC held its annual training seminar bringing together corporate, hotel, and security leaders from competing companies that understand the value of sharing resources to help make every hotel and lodging safer and more secure.
Academia, Government, and Non-governmental Organisations also understand the value of partnership. In May 2019, I was invited to contribute to a seminar at the NYU Center for Global Affairs. I represented the hotel sector and spoke on the role the private sector can play in security and counterterrorism. My contribution was based on a list of the partnerships I had learned the most from.
The private sector often has resource advantages to which the public sector doesn’t always have access. These can include:
global, internal, information gathering and communication networks
”boots on the ground” with some companies covering over 150 countries
physical resources (technology, financial and human) that might not always be readily available in the public sector
If everyone agrees that partnerships are good, why don’t they all work well? Why isn’t every public-private partnership successful?
In my experience, 3 key C’s are critical ingredients of any successful partnership.
Communicate
The key to leveraging the advantages partnerships provide is openly communicating and engaging with the other stakeholders. Simple and direct contact and communication are more efficient and effective than trying to design the perfect plan. Some of the most successful partnerships I experienced were not successful because a formal and approved partnership was created. They resulted from good people with good ideas and intentions reaching out to other good people with access to knowledge and expertise that could make mutually beneficial goals achievable.
Collaborate
Without trust, there is no collaboration. Successful partnerships involve people who can look each other in the eye, understand their role in reaching an agreed goal and work both independently and together toward the goal. This can only be developed with the help of personal commitment, interaction, and time. It’s as much about having informal, personal conversations, as it is about having formal, agenda-driven meetings. Trust is the foundation for the collaboration that is integral to any partnership.
If you have good, open, and direct communication and you have the necessary trust to collaborate with your partners what would stop you from making the partnership work?
Contribute
The final piece of the partnership puzzle is contributing. It’s also the piece I most often find is missing. Perhaps the foundation of trust is too weak, or perhaps it’s because our society has focused so much on business and financial success that some feel that they need to be careful not to give “too much” to a partnership. They work on getting a good “profit margin” for their efforts. I call this the “what’s in it for me” threat. If there is too much “what’s in it for me” and too little “what’s in it for us” in a partnership, the partnership will be less successful than it could have been and there is a risk that it will not be successful at all.
Results
During my career, understanding the value of partnerships led to results I’m extremely proud of. Internally, much of the success of our safety and security program was thanks to the fact that the people I worked together with, remained as loyal to the company and our goals as I was. In times when people often jumped from company to company, my two closest colleagues were with the company as long as me. That gave us an enormous institutional knowledge base as well as internal and external networks of contacts that were of immense value to us and our growing company.
Externally, the focus I placed on the value of partnerships was also recognized, and I’ve been honoured to share my learnings with influential institutions such as the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, and the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism where I’m proud to serve as a member of the expert network supporting the UN Global Program on Countering Terrorism Against Vulnerable Targets.
As the world navigates through increasingly uncertain times, the value of partnership in resolving the common challenges we all face on our single planet is more important than ever.
How would your career, your business, or your life improve through a better understanding of the value of creating successful partnerships? Instead of asking “what’s in it for me”, how much more can be achieved when we ask “what’s in it for us”?
The 3 keys to successful partnerships, both public-private, private-private and other kinds of partnerships also became the motto for the consulting company my wife and I started when we relocated to Canada in 2018.
Communicate, Collaborate, Contribute
I like to say that my post-high school gap year in Europe, turned into a 4-decade-long education at the “University of Life” and included a 30-year, basement-to-boardroom career at a company that didn’t want to hire me.
It was a career that taught me many life-long lessons that I share through these newsletters.
Stay safe, Always Care