Last weekend, I had the honor of attending Harvard University’s annual Private and Public Scientific, Academic and Consumer Food Policy Group Conference, better known as PAPSAC. Founded more than 25 years ago by noted academic and researcher Ray Goldberg, PAPSAC is a closed-door conference where industry leaders, farmers, academics, philanthropists and policymakers gather to discuss and debate the critical issues facing our food system. This year, topics included affordability, sustainability, supply chain resilience, the role of AI in agriculture and the future of agriculture-led economic development.
A recurring theme from the conference was the growing importance of partnerships as an essential tool for tackling the complex challenges facing agriculture today. Whether it is dealing with the Ogallala Aquifer water crisis in the High Plains or improving agricultural practices in Africa, collaboration across industry, government, farmers and civil society is critical. When pressed about how to make these partnerships work, participants’ answer was nearly universal, whether they were a CEO, a farmer or a foundation vice president: The key is trust.
Trust is like rocket fuel in a partnership. When partners have trust, they can get problems out in the open quickly and resolve them. When there is trust, partners can commit with confidence. Strong trust among partners enables a partnership to move from intention to action and from action to results much more quickly. How do we create a culture of trust within a partnership? Trust is driven by two factors: behavior and governance.
Three behaviors are especially important for building trust across sectors:
Dr Darian McBain, the head of Outsourced CSO Asia and one of the savviest partnership builders in the sector, frequently emphasizes the importance of ‘critical friends’ in partnerships. What is a critical friend? An environmental NGO can and should be critical of a company that is causing environmental or social harm. However, when that NGO wants to work constructively with the firm to resolve those issues, it needs to take care not to delegitimize the company. When we declare that an organization is illegitimate or should be banned, we put the organization in a defensive posture, which undermines trust and makes cooperation virtually impossible. In a partnership, an NGO can disagree, quite strongly, with a company without delegitimizing it. That is what being a ‘critical friend’ is all about.
Companies need to achieve business goals. NGOs need to raise money. Governments need to show that they deliver results for constituents. Managers want to get promoted. There is nothing wrong with an organization or an individual in a partnership having a level of self-interest. In fact, enlightened self-interest is essential for partnerships. The key is not to hide these intentions and motivations from your partners. Being transparent about our organizational, and even our individual, motivations for partnering builds trust among partners.
This may seem less obvious, but a common cause of broken trust is a lack of internal alignment within one of the partner organizations. When that happens, the organization appears to say one thing and do another, which looks like hypocrisy. For example, Resonance was supporting a major US food and beverage company to empower women in its supply chains. While there was deep and enthusiastic support for the partnership at headquarters, that support did not always translate to the company’s operational sites around the world. In Southeast Asia, the local business unit simply would not engage actively in the partnership, even though the region was meant to be a showcase. Partners grew concerned that the company was saying one thing but failing to follow through on the ground. Why was the business unit so reluctant? Its business metrics and incentives were not aligned with the goals of the partnership, so the work felt like an extra burden for which the local team received no credit. It was only when the CEO visited the region and highlighted the partnership that the local business unit got on board and became a champion of the partnership. This is a great example of how poor organizational alignment can undermine trust and how strong executive leadership can remedy it.
The second element of building a culture of trust in a partnership is governance. How are decisions made in the partnership? Who has authority to speak on behalf of the partnership? Who manages day-to-day operations and ensures work gets done? How will we resolve disputes when they arise? Good governance also needs to be right-sized to the partnership. Large, complex partnerships may require dedicated governance structures and a standing secretariat. Smaller, less complex partnerships can often be governed via regular check-in calls and status reporting.
When a partnership has a governance structure that is fit-for-purpose, it provides the scaffolding for a culture of trust. It creates the venues and pathways for partners to align and come to decisions. It enables outside stakeholders to understand how decisions are made and by whom. Resonance’s new Partnership Guide offers practical advice on establishing effective governance structures for partnerships, large and small.
Trust is often treated as a happy byproduct of a partnership that is going well. The conversations at PAPSAC pointed to the opposite conclusion: trust is what allows a partnership to go well in the first place, and it has to be built deliberately, long before the hard moments arrive. In an era of deep skepticism toward institutions, that work falls to the people leading partnerships.
Before your next partner meeting, take an honest look at your own collaboration. Are partners disagreeing without delegitimizing one another? Has each organization been candid about what it needs from the partnership? Is your own organization aligned from headquarters to the field? Is your governance sized to the work? If any of those answers give you pause, download Resonance’s Partnership Guide for practical tools on governance and partner alignment, or get in touch with our team to talk through how to give your partnership the fuel it needs.
Steve Schmida is the CEO of Resonance and the author of Partner with Purpose.