Making Your Partnership a Learning Experience
Making Your Partnership a Learning Experience
Apart from the many more obvious benefits of your community business
partnership, one other bonus which this relationship can bring is education. Not only can learning be incorporated
into your community business partnership model, but just being involved
in a partnership can give you opportunities to learn.
Learning Through your Chosen Partnership Model
While most partnership models encourage some
level of learning, there are a few that have learning and the exchange
of knowledge at their heart: mentoring, skills and knowledge sharing, and secondment.
Mentoring is a process
which sees one person share their specific knowledge and expertise with others.
- The mentor serves as a teacher – offering
encouragement, information and feedback on a regular basis to the person
they are mentoring.
- It stimulates personal development, as well as building the
capacity of the community in which the person being mentored lives and
works.
Skills and Knowledge Sharing
sees an increase in the capacity of community business partners, as well as the wider
community in which they operate.
- One partner uses their skills or knowledge to the
other's benefit, with initiatives such as providing a management plan or establishing a
risk management strategy. Unlike mentoring, which can be more of a
one-way flow of communication, sharing skills and knowledge is an active,
two-way involvement.
Secondment is linked to
the Skills and Knowledge Sharing partnership model, and is where a
business lends one of its skilled staff to a community group for a
period of time to help that group complete a task.
- Often secondment can occur in fields like accounting or law
where an individual works for the other partner to provide
knowledge and skills while learning how the other organisation operates.
Learning in any Partnership
Most other partnership models still offer some learning opportunities, including:
- Sharing management techniques
– both operational techniques and “people-management” methods.
- Sharing and transferring skills and
abilities.
- Sharing knowledge of
organisational or operational methods.
- Staff and community group
members sharing experiences, as well as working with each other.
- Information and advice being shared on
how to deal with troublesome situations, bad publicity, etc.
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