#GuildChat for 9/27/19: Making Work Partnerships Work

Our next #GuildChat takes place Friday, September 27th at 11am PT / 2pm ET. This week’s chat is on Making Work Partnerships Work.

Working in partnership with others – from SMEs to clients to co-workers to partners outside your organization like vendors – is a pretty standard part of the work we do in learning and development. Those partnerships can also be a bit tricky to navigate at times. When it’s going well, you’re able to create fantastic solutions you couldn’t have come up with all on your own. When it’s bumpy, though, the stress, misunderstandings, and arguments can remind you of why most people hated group work projects back in school.

So how do we make these work partnerships… well… work? Join us this week as we unpack what can make partnerships complicated and share our experiences and tips for how to help them run smoother.

Prospective questions

Q1 What can make partnering with others hard?
Q2 When you’re partnering with someone you’ve never worked with before, what are some good things to do to kick things off right?
Q3 Sometimes your partners’ expectations are hard to pin down. What are some approaches you’ve used that can help with this challenge?
Q4 Getting sign off is often critical at various stages in a project. How do you make sure your stakeholder partners truly understand the overall project and what they’re signing off on?
Q5 When collaborating with others, how can you best handle situations where expectations weren’t met (yours or theirs)?
Q6 What tools have you used to improve or extend communication when collaborating with others?
Q7 Sometimes you have to partner with someone that wouldn’t be your first pick. What have you found can help you make the best of a not-ideal partner?
Q8 Trust makes partnerships much easier. What are some ways to build trust with your partners (and to help them to build trust with you)?

Missed this GuildChat? Don’t worry – you can still read through what happened on our Wakelet transcript of the chat!