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One of the key elements of leadership is partnership. Not everyone would agree with this; you could argue that, in the presence of a powerful leader, partnership is unnecessary – you will get the job done with or without the involvement of others. But in today’s organisations, this is not enough. You might achieve the result, but at what cost? If you don’t involve others, you leave them disempowered and demotivated. You don’t train them in how to produce results. Your organisation is the poorer, and if you leave, your knowledge and skill leaves too.

We all face conflict at work. Reactions range from ‘ostrich-like’ avoidance at one extreme to ‘just losing it’ at the other. Here’s a framework to help you move from conflict to consensus. First, it’s useful to distinguish two aspects and deal with these differently…

Who is ‘they’ in your organisation? ‘Sales’? ‘Marketing’? ‘the staff’?, ‘customers’? Do ‘they’ seem to be making your job harder to do? Do you hear stuff like (or catch yourself saying): “this job would be fine if it wasn’t for ‘them’!”, “nobody tells me anything”, “‘they’ move the goalposts all the time”?

The second key principle in our three-part series on Leadership is Partnership. We define Leadership as “holding the Vision, causing Partnership, and holding people to Account”. Yesterday, we explored the area of Accountability. Today we are going to take a look at Partnership, which we define as: ‘holding oneself to account for the success of each member of the team’.