When companies respond constructively to employees’ needs, they discover the keys to unleashing extraordinary energy, creativity, productivity, and loyalty. When companies partner with employees, productivity soars. Making the case for investing time, energy, and money in human resource development, however, is as tough a chore as ever because of the ways we’ve thought about business for the last two hundred years. But as we continue to evolve from the industrial age into the information age, our human resources paradigm will need to change. This new age requires us to think about the intellectual capital humans create and how to cultivate it if we want to succeed in the future. The exponential growth in the sophistication of the technologies we use persuades us that this era is different from, and presumably better than, the industrial age. Yet many of our attitudes about how work should be done to maximize productivity haven’t changed from the days when production workers monotonously repeated the same steps on the assembly line for thirty years.
Building great internal partnerships is a critical first step in becoming a partnering powerhouse. Certainly there is terrific potential in this area, but few companies recognize relationships with employees as partnerships. Most take them for granted. But people want meaning and self-fulfillment from their work. They want cordial and respectful relations with the people they meet at work. They want to be part of the enterprise, part of a team, a value to the company. Companies and their employees can have a genuine, active, profitable partnership where everyone gets what they need—but only if they understand the principles of the partnering process and know how to increase their collective Partnering Intelligence.