No matter what personality type you have or how easy to get along with you might be, there are likely to be some people that you can work well with, and others that you struggle with. Some partnerships work so well that the two partners working together achieve far more than the sum of what they could have achieved working apart. Other partnerships achieve less than what one of the partners could have achieved by himself or herself. Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life, by Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, sets out to identify the factors that make up a great partnership.
The Gallup organisation conducted research into the issue, and this resulted in a theoretical model of dyadic collaborative relationships. Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller have distilled this into eight elements of a successful partnership. In a successful partnership, the respective partners have complementary strengths, they share a common mission, they treat each other with fairness, there is a high level of trust, the partners accept each other’s idiosyncrasies, mistakes are forgiven, the partners communicate well, and they are unselfish towards each other.
The book includes a chapter on each of these elements, and concludes with some additional insights for leaders and managers. The chapters contain plenty of anecdotes illustrating the principles described, making them very interesting and engaging. This is a useful book for anyone who wants to work on improving collaborative relationships.
A video review is available on my new site, BusinessLessons.org.