Jim Citrin Leadership by Example

Abercrombie & Fitch, Procter & Gamble, Ben & Jerry -- there's something magical about great business partnerships.

If you were to seek a partner to help you lead a business, what would you look for? How would you set up the relationship for success, and what are the pitfalls you'd be sure to avoid?

These are precisely the questions a Fortune 500 CEO recently asked me to help him answer. To develop advice for him, and for you, I'll draw some lessons learned from business partnerships that have worked exceedingly well.

The Qualities of a Good Partnership

The most essential ingredients in successful partnerships are chemistry, shared values, mutual respect, and complementary skills and experiences. Here are the details:

• Chemistry

You can generally judge your chemistry with someone in the earliest minutes of meeting them. Trust your first impressions, which are based on a lifetime of experience interacting with other people. However, as much as you should take your intuition into account, don't be a prisoner to your immediate feelings.

Charismatic people -- especially those with a well-developed sense of empathy -- can zero in on what makes you tick and what you're looking for. So build on your first impressions with multiple meetings and interactions in different settings.

How do you feel about the other person over a business dinner or in a group setting? Does a different person come through on the golf course or over dinner with spouses? What clues do you see in the person's interactions with others in your organization, not only senior executives, but receptionists, administrative professionals, and front-line staff?

When Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast Corporation, was recruiting Steve Burke to become COO of the cable giant in 1998, they spent hours together in these and other settings. What became clear to both was that their chemistry and the foundation of their relationship improved.

Pay attention to the trend of your feelings about the other person over time. It's a good sign if you're increasingly comfortable; if you feel less comfortable, take heed.

• Shared values

What you stand for -- such as hard work, fairness, and a passion to win -- should synch completely with your prospective partner's values, otherwise you're asking for trouble.

In one high-profile partnership that flamed out, the CEO assumed that his COO would work the same long hours that he did, and that he would be equally frugal (the COO would later say miserly) with the company's resources but similarly philanthropic on a personal level.

The COO, however, had come from a large global company with vast resources and decades of doing business a certain way. He assumed that hours in the office didn't matter as long as the job got done, and that part of the rewards for delivering winning results was enjoying the perks that a large corporation could offer. The pair had never even discussed supporting charities during the recruitment process, and this turned out to be an emotional flashpoint for the CEO. The COO left in less than a year.

• Mutual respect

Not unlike a marriage, all successful business partnerships are built on mutual respect. A person's intellect, track record, and educational and family backgrounds are among the many attributes that contribute to your feelings of respect for them, and respecting your partner in areas important to you is indispensable in making a partnership work.

Dysfunctional partnerships are no secret to anyone across the organization, and disrespectful behavior demeans both executives in the process and poisons the well for everyone else.

• Complementary skills and experiences

Match yourself with someone whose skills and experience are different from yours, and that add to your own. While it's common to hire someone in your own image, it's vital to hold steadfast to the goal of adding complementary skills and experience.

In fact, great partnerships almost always include some form of yin and yang, whether it be a strong strategist paired with a great operator, or a business and finance executive coupled with a creative leader.

Martha Stewart is clearly the creative and design force behind Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, while CEO Susan Lyne runs every aspect of the business and corporate operations. Similarly, Howard Schultz is and always will be the "soul" and marketing genius behind Starbucks, while CEO Jim Donald is the operationally savvy leader in charge of bringing ideas, products, and quality service to millions of consumers worldwide.

Ensuring Success, Avoiding Pitfalls

It's fundamental for a successful partnership to define roles with precision, to clearly set and manage expectations, and to communicate frequently and effectively. If any of these elements falls through the cracks, it's only a matter of time before there's trouble.

Here are the key elements:

• Role definition

The best partnerships invest time upfront agreeing on who does what, not only in theoretical terms but using real-life scenarios. For example, consider who'll make management appointments or terminations, develop advertising and promotional programs, speak to company directors, appear in the press, meet with investors, initiate or respond to acquisitions, and make capital investments.

When Michael Ovitz became COO at Disney, he thought it was his role to manage the operating divisions and initiate strategic partnerships for the company, among other things. But the more he tried to play this role, the more Michael Eisner and other senior managers became annoyed with his behavior.

In a contrasting high-performing partnership, the CEO and COO jointly developed a document -- almost a constitution -- that established the goals of their collaboration, including decisions about who was responsible for what, how they would work together, and how they would resolve issues over which they disagreed.

That document, which they review and update quarterly, has helped them address inevitable challenges smoothly.

• Managing expectations

The greatest pitfall in a partnership is when there's a mismatch about the goals for, roles of, and contributions to the partnership. Even when everything else works well, if you and a partner are working toward different goals, all your efforts will fail.

When Bill Perez left giant consumer-products company S.C. Johnson to become chief executive at Nike, he believed his job was to bring more operating discipline, consumer research and testing, and sophisticated management to the freewheeling, entrepreneurial company.

However, when founder, chairman, and icon Phil Knight saw the changes Perez was instituting, exacerbated by the grumbling of the long-time Nike colleagues who built the company with Knight, he determined that he didn't want to bring those qualities to the company -- at least not in the way that Perez was attempting to implement them.

In the spirit of learning from experience, however, less than a year after he left Nike, Perez agreed to become CEO at Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company -- the first non-family member to lead the $5 billion company it its 116-year history. Before accepting the position, Perez spent weeks working with 43-year-old CEO Bill Wrigley defining roles, work styles, and expectations. When Perez joined the company in October 2006, Wrigley moved into the role of executive chairman. Initial signs about the partnership are very encouraging.

• Communications

It's impossible to overstate how imperative it is to communicate frequently and effectively to make a partnership work. More often than not, poor communication is at the root of expectations gaps, blurred roles, and the sending of mixed signals to an organization.

At Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, CEO Susan Lyne has a regularly scheduled business lunch with Martha with an agenda of projects, priorities, and decisions. They complement this with a monthly dinner with no explicit agenda, but during which other important decisions, cultural issues, and personnel considerations are discussed.

Between these structured meetings, the pair exchanges e-mails, voicemails, and office stop-bys, which collectively assure that they can never stray very far from the same page.

Share Your Advice

Have you had experience in a business partnership? What worked well? What would you do differently? What advice would you offer to a Fortune 500 CEO if he were to ask you? Kindly share your comments below (constructive comments are especially appreciated).