Is your fair trade group or organization just a floating ‘head’ - a head full of great ideas, but with no sense of who it is, where it’s going or how to get there? Does it lack a real ‘body’- a body with substance, structure and parts that work together as a unified, coherent whole – a body others can see, understand and know?
If your organization in any way represents this “bodiless head”, others could quite reasonably ask, “Why would I want to be in partnership with you? Sorry, I like you, but…you’ve just got no…PARTNERSHIP CAPACITY”
This sort of thinking is a huge part of our personal lives. From infants we are constantly assessing and reassessing, building and rebuilding our own and others partnership capacity (some say women do this more than men, but I’m not sure). Anyway, when it comes to business and particularly fairer trading business, we don’t seem to spend much time or effort on this at all! Do you?
If we did, we may find out some interesting and valuable explanations of our own and others partnership success (or lack there of)!
How might we start assessing our capacity to create, develop and maintain successful fair trading partnerships? My suggestion is not to make it too complex to begin with. For a quick first scan try out this easy checklist of key partnership capacity indicators.
The Top 5 ‘Partnership Capacity’ Indicators
- A simple and unambiguous organizational purpose – What part of the fair trade business is the organization in? Why this part of the fair trade business?
- A rigorous governance structure and practice – a governance body or management group skilled in, and committed to, provision and review of organizational direction, workable policy development and rigorous operational oversight.
- A comprehensive suite of clear and detailed explanations of the roles and responsibilities of all organizational members and stakeholders.
- Simple and consistently applied processes for monitoring, evaluating and improving all aspects of organizational performance.
- And finally, the most important partnership capacity indicator of all…To practice what you preach –to be doing what you say you want to be doing in accord with your espoused beliefs and values.
How did you go? Would those you seek to be in fair trading partnerships with want to be in partnership with you?
To get a closer look at a group of fair trade organizations with extensive partnership capacity and an outstanding record of partnership success, check out Iain Davies’ 2009 research here.
