Team and partnership building

Alongside the engagement of an entire organisation or community in creating change, there will often be a need to support individual teams and often complex partnerships in order to further the work.

Team building
In Wikima, effective team working is automatically and naturally built into the interactive methodologies and processes we use. So, in many cases, team building is almost a powerful by-product of the way we help clients to do their ‘real work’. Those involved are given a visceral, lived experience of working together differently and becoming more effective teams. At the same time, the work of the organisation or community is moved forward. When asked to support clients in team building, this will be our starting point.

Recognising a distinction between groups of people working together and those who constitute a ‘team’, we also give you access to tried and tested models of team working. Some of this work we offer in partnership with our colleagues from the Praxis Centre at Cranfield University’s School of Management (www.cranfield.ac.uk/som).

Partnership building
In the mid 80s, Romy (Wikima Founder) began working with cross-sector partnership building: bringing together the private, public and civil society sectors. Because it is increasingly clear that no one sector in society can deliver the complexities of what is needed for social, economic and environmental health (sustainable development), such strategic alliances are a growing feature of many economies – both national and local. Most businesses are keen to play their part effectively.

The partnership field is increasingly sophisticated, so we offer consultancy and significant, practical programmes to achieve genuine partnership. Some of these are delivered with colleagues such as the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum (www.iblf.org).

For a few top-line tips on purposeful partnership see Making it Real.

In the UK, we support the effective development and operation of Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and Community Plans, by combining our organisational and partnership work with extensive experience in garnering balanced and broad public participation – each requires a distinct skill set.

Businesses now recognise that playing their part and contributing to the wellbeing of the wider world (corporate social responsibility/CSR) is a must. Inevitably this requires partnering with often less familiar ‘bed fellows’: we help create partnerships which work strategically for each partner.

Within the corporate sector, our prime partnership work centres focuses on transforming mergers from those in name only, to genuinely harnessing the strengths and brilliance of all elements. Without this, individuals within the new entity are unlikely to be fulfilled and the promised bottom line delivery is severely threatened.

“We’ve lost decades of unfailing commitment, extraordinary imagination and amazing performance by our people. They feel squashed and ignored by the (partner) people… and many of our stars are now leaving. The results that were spoken of just aren’t coming through.” (leading technology MNC)

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