The Soft Underbelly of Collaboration

It seems like everybody is talking about how important is for organizations to work together. Foundations, who are seeing a growing demand for their resources, but want to see a greater impact for their donations, encourage organizations to work collaboratively around key issue areas, geography and target groups. Elected officials like to see stakeholders come together to tackle problems that plague the community. After all, “it takes a village to raise a child”, and probably several villages to save the world. Organizations work collaboratively to share the workload; strengthen organizational capacity; share lessons learned and create synergies around new and existing programs.

What we don’t talk about so much, are the potential pitfalls and vulnerabilities of partnership. I like to call these the soft underbelly, of collaboration. These include things like inequitable compensation and visibility for collaborators in proportion to their contributions; financial risks exceeding the potential rewards; broken relationships and lack of accountability, to name only a few. Every collaboration is different, and each one carries its own sets of issues and risks.

Like marriage, collaborations are not to be entered into unadvisedly. For every successful collaboration of which I’ve been a part, I can name several more that have failed, for one reason or another…