Trust and sustainability

Ways to navigate conflict and sustain your partnership

Partnerships naturally experience conflict. Challenges related to survivor inclusion and leadership are not the only places where partnership leaders must carefully navigate the experiences, personalities, positions, and aims of collaborators. The optimal collaboration creates a wide and inclusive network that brings together people from diverse perspectives and professions to share knowledge, information, and skills while casting a broader net for reaching potential and actual victims of human trafficking.

Even with such great momentum and success, there are still concerns about gaps in terms of who is sitting at the table, who has the power in the room, and who’s voice is being heard. Trust is an essential requirement for effective partnership. When partnerships enjoy trust, they have the opportunity to set and achieve goals together.

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Conflict and partnership leadership

How will your partnership foster trust?

How do you define trust within your partnership?

Trust can be defined as one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open.

How do you build trust within your partnership?

Successful partnerships build on trust by being specific about the goals they have and regularly evaluating and re-aligning goals, as well as commit to the time required to achieve those goals.

What is the purpose of trust within your partnership?

The purpose of trust in collaboration is to make inter-organizational relations function more effectively by reducing complexity and fostering cooperation in ways that more formal contracts cannot.

Have you considered different forms of trust? How are these addressed within your partnership?

Relational trust is defined by the personal connections that individuals have within the movement.
Responsibility-based trust is defined by duties or roles.

Have you considered different strategies within early versus mature partnerships?

Early partnerships experience conflict from the personalities or persons involved (as individuals) or the perceptions of the roles and goals of the organization represented by persons joining the partnership
Mature partnerships view conflict as welcome and necessary for the group to evolve and maintain trust
Personality-driven conflict dissipates as relational trust grows
Priority-driven conflict declines as responsibility-based forms of trust grow

Building trust and sustainability

How will your partnership foster trust?

How do you define trust within your partnership?

Trust can be defined as one party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open.

How do you build trust within your partnership?

Successful partnerships build on trust by being specific about the goals they have and regularly evaluating and re-aligning goals, as well as commit to the time required to achieve those goals.

What is the purpose of trust within your partnership?

The purpose of trust in collaboration is to make inter-organizational relations function more effectively by reducing complexity and fostering cooperation in ways that more formal contracts cannot.

Have you considered different forms of trust? How are these addressed within your partnership?

Relational trust is defined by the personal connections that individuals have within the movement.
Responsibility-based trust is defined by duties or roles.

How will your partnership be sustainable over time?

What supports partnership sustainability?

Partnership leadership/governance
Commitment
Desire or interest to end human trafficking
Quality of efforts and shared goals
Funding
Multidisciplinary or multi-agency partnership
Legislative Support
Resolving conflict or address tough personalities
Open communication

Have you considered creating a sustainability plan?

A sustainability plan is a tool that considers a full range of necessary resources and outlines specific strategies and action items toward long-term viability. Sustainability planning includes:
- Vision: What does sustainability look like? Ensure the sustainability vision aligns with the organization identity.
- Results orientation: Develop short and long-term goals specific to achieving the sustainability vision, define specific action items under each goal that will help the project move forward, define benchmarks to assess progress toward sustainability goals.
- Strategies: Determine specific action items for developing and maintaining key partnerships necessary for sustainability.
- Resources: Outline the resources needed for sustainability and strategies for securing and maintaining resources.