by Rhiannon Stocking-Williams (Partnership Development Worker)
7 November 2004
We are sold the idea of partnership working for all the positive gains – and rightly so. When we work in partnership we are able to learn; to grow as professionals, people and organisations; to benefit from economies of scale (potentially); to provide better services to a wider selection of the population… well, you know the rest.
Yet part of the picture is also what I would call partnership pain, and I maintain that it is both realistic and necessary to anticipate and experience it. A sort of no-pain, no gain equation.
My role, involves me in supporting the development of partnerships through the Reading Voluntary Sector Forum (RVSF) representatives team, where they sit on various health and social care partnerships, and I work for them ‘outside’ their partnership meetings. I also work within a number of formal and informal partnerships, with RVSF, Reading Primary Care Trust and Reading Borough Council. So, hearing about and experiencing this partnership pain is part of my job description.
In partnerships, we all stand on different parts of the same map, and therefore we each see different bits of the landscape. No-one in a partnership knows everything – we all know a bit and aim to join up those bits to cover the whole map.
Pain can arise from partners getting stuck on their bit of the map - from their different perceptions of client groups; methods of consulting those clients and delivering services to them; and how to use the money and resources that are available in Reading to provide those services. Meetings get tense, tempers get frayed and patience runs thin – and out. But, hang in there!
Learning that comes from pain can ultimately be more valued and retained, and sometimes we need to allow people to take a path that we think is the wrong one so that they have experienced it first-hand – seeing/feeling is believing. Occasionally, the ‘wrong’ path we think they’ve chosen may reap unexpected successes. Risk is an integral part of partnership working.
“There came a time when the risk to remain
tight in the bud was more painful than the risk
it took to blossom.”
Taken from the Diaries of Anais Nin. (1931 – 1934)
The pain I am talking about here I would liken to birth or growing pains. Other partnership pain can be less dynamic and progressive and that may stem from the intransigence of people involved in partnerships with no intention of learning, growing and changing. Preventative medicine comes in various forms: establishing a contract at the start (or introducing it part-way through – but this is much harder) through clear and agreed terms of reference; looking at the many ‘good partnerships’ guides and websites around and systematically evaluating the partnership itself (rather than only the work of the partnership), and sometimes, you just have to know when to quit.
At a recent meeting, I confessed to being in partnership pain because I was feeling irritable, impatient and frustrated about progress. I also hoped that others were feeling it too and might share some insight with me. It was risky – I may have been the only one feeling this way and the rest of the partners may have deduced from my confession that I wasn’t experienced enough and I would have lost credibility. As it turned out, we all agreed that the path had been rocky and I believe that because some partners were subsequently able to express their pain, we have now retained valuable partners who may have simply given up and resigned from the partnership.
The experience brought home to me how much partnership working is about the people who are the partners and how they (and the organisations they represent) can bond, develop trust and grow through partnership pain that is positively sought and carefully managed.
