How satisfied are you with your alliances and your alliance partners?
How satisfied are your partners with you and the alliances you are in together?
You might be able to answer the first question quickly. However, your answer might be based on your gut feeling instead of on an actual measurements. Answering the second question might require even more guess work…
Unless you perform regular health checks on your alliances! Then it will no longer be guessing the level of partner satisfaction, but then you actually know the score. Even more important, with a regular health check you know where you and your partner have a different opinion about the status of the alliance. Based on the outcome of a health check, you can easily identify the areas that need attention.
Regular alliance health checks will help you to optimize the performance of your alliances. It will preserve and leverage your alliance investments. With the right health check methodology, you might even identify new opportunities in working with existing partners.
Personally I like to combine an online assessment with a select number of in depth interviews.
In the online assessment, multiple people from both partners will provide a scoring to a number of questions. These questions are within the same categories as you assessed your partner with during the partner selection: strategic fit, operational fit and cultural fit. The result to this scoring will be presented in a spider diagram, easily showing where there is a discrepancy in satisfaction among the alliance partners.
The in depth interviews will provide more substance to the information. They will help to find a direction for a solution where there might be misalignment in satisfaction. Also, the interviews will help to identify new opportunities among existing partners.
Assessing the status of a strategic alliance is essential to keep your alliance healthy. Too often we make assumptions of how our partner feels about us and our alliance and in the rush of the day we forget to take a step back to really assess the status.
Interested in the real status of your alliance? Contact me here or call me directly to discuss how an independently performed alliance health check can help you boost the performance of your alliances!