Partnership and Problem-Solving Communications

Qualities Found in Productive Partnerships

• system openness;
  
• responsiveness to felt needs;
  
• acknowledged self-interest;
  
• suitable personal skills and values;
  
• collaborative leadership;
  
• realistic yet measurable goals;
  
• action-oriented behavior;
  
• organizational parity;
  
• reciprocity;
  
• cultural sensitivity;
  
• dedicated resources; and
  
• organizational structure supports mission.

Barriers to Building Productive Partnerships

• lack of time, people and other resources;
  
• limitations in organization's capacity to deliver goods;
  
• lack of skills in the area of cooperative decision-making;
  
• lack of models for organizing people;
  
• poor matches between organizational goals/cultures;
  
• lack of trust;
  
• inability to give up some control; and
  
• lack of continuity in leadership.

How Partners Relate With Each Other

• shared decision-making;
  
• shared leadership;
  
• personal commitment and shared values; and
  
• culture of caring.

How Partners Define Their Work

• cultivate shared vision/goals;
  
• construct fluid structural designs;
  
• use action as a springboard for understanding between groups; and
  
• engaged in highly interdependent experiences and an intensive, process-oriented approach to work.

Work Styles for Effective Partnerships

• consensual decision-making vs. authoritarian;
  
• interdependent vs. independent group efforts; and
  
• messy collaborative processes vs. neat, efficient activity.

To build a foundation of trust, all partners must understand and practice problem-solving communication. This method of partnership decision-making includes listening, interacting, and building consensus to arrive at solutions.
The benefits of problem-solving communication are:

• the person who owns the problem owns the solution;
  
• participation in the decision-making process increases motivation;
  
• collaboration introduces more choices; and
  
• the final decision reflects consensus.

Six Steps in Problem-Solving Communication
The following steps show how to implement problem-solving communication in dealing with community issues.

1. Identify the problem. What problems, for example, do you foresee in working directly with the community?
2. Brainstorm possible solutions. Brainstorming should be creative and non-judgmental. All alternatives should be presented, and piggybacking ideas is fine.
3. Evaluate and narrow options. This step requires effective listening and sometimes conflict-resolution skills. Having identified possible solutions, which options seem most viable?
4. Reach consensus on alternative(s) and make a decision. To arrive at a solution, the group must agree on who makes the final decision and why (leader, small group, whole group?), and how the decision will be made (vote, leader's determination, consensus of representative group?).
5. Implement solutions. This will require action steps, which in some cases will be simple to define. In other cases, the group may have to repeat steps 1 through 4.
6. Follow-up has two components: making sure team members know who will implement action steps, and devising a way to evaluate how the implementation process worked.