Emotional commitment is critical for being an effective dynamic leader. For these leaders, commitment is about emotional vesting, perseverance, and passion. The sense of reward they derive from their accomplishments feeds more than their pocketbooks: It feeds their souls.

The word “emotion” is used with restraint in business. It is often equated with weakness and instability. Emotional vesting does not mean losing emotional control. Nor does it mean burdening your coworkers or superiors with emotional problems. Emotional vesting means that the individual has the capacity to have strong and passionate expectations for positive results. It means working with commitment and not clocking in and out on a rigid schedule, but rather as the workload and projects demand. Vesting in the activity means that the desire for success is high — and so are the rewards.

The Environment for Emotional Vesting
Some shortsighted companies may rationalize a high level of emotional vesting by individuals as an excuse not to be concerned about the organizational environment. If employees love their work, the might say, then the working conditions will not matter. That is a very dangerous rationalization, though it may work in the short term.
But, as pressures of growth and market changes case work to be restructured or redefined, the environment and the corporate culture will become a more compelling factor in attracting or retaining people. Lack of attention to a consistent corporate culture is certain to drive away emotionally vested dynamic leaders. What is common in highly political and bureaucratic organizations is that the emotional vesting is psychologically beaten out of people.
Eventually, they protect themselves emotionally from such hurt by not giving their all to make success happen, individually or organizationally.
One sure-fire way that organizations can foster emotional vesting is through fun. Says Valerie Salembier, publisher of Esquire magazine, “The Esquire staff is incredibly committed to what we are doing, but it’s also fun. We’ve created a work environment where there is a lot of laughing going on.
There are so many ups and downs every single day, it is like a big roller coaster ride. As such, one needs to make sure that the people on the team are enjoying what they do so that they can leave at the end of the day happy. All of us believe passionately in this magazine, and because of that we can create the best product and do the right thing for the customer.”

Despite the proliferation of strategic alliances, one alarming fact remains true: most business alliances fail. In fact, through my research I have found that more than half (60 percent) of alliances fall apart three years after conception.

There are steps companies can — and should — take to increase the likelihood of alliance success. The following are what I call the Golden Rules of Alliances.

Rule #1: The First Partner Is Not Always the Best Partner

Even if a partner, who appears to be appropriate, approaches you, move from reactive to proactive mode. Do due diligence on strategic fit of this partner and others, and create an alliance implementation strategy.

Too often, alliances are created without equal thought being given to both strategic purpose and ultimate implementation. Execution of alliance intent is far more difficult than the deal making and partner identification and wooing that precedes deal closure. Conduct a thorough assessment of skill and competency gaps between participating partners, and establish a mission statement for your alliance that has both qualitative (for example, “license 50% of new technology”) and quantitative (such as, “increase revenues by 30%”) elements.

Rule #2: Always Speak to the Partners of Your Partner

Every partner in an organization brings in a host of interlocking relationships with other partners, stakeholders, and players in the value chain. These networks of relationships — what I call the Spider Network in my book Fast Alliances – Power your E-business represent a web of opportunities and risks that could impact your activities. The key to creating a successful Spider Network is not only the basic of listing the network members who are ever changing. Instead, it is the disciplined approach of ranking them for risk and value, and then allocating resources accordingly to manage the risk, and leverage the value that could be derived from more integrated relationships.

Rule #3: Be Sure There Is an Executive Sponsor in Both Your Organization and in Your Partner’s

The sponsor should be part of a team so that if one champion loses interest there will be another one to take his place. Executive sponsorship is only valuable if it has continuing influence on the alliance. This means adding ‘position power’ to the influence that the alliance manager can have across the organization, as well as a conflict resolution mechanism that acts as a deterrent to accelerating conflict above lower levels of management.

Rule #4: Analyze the Priority of the Alliance for Yourself and Your Partner

Partnering companies must take into account what I call the Project Personality Type. An alliance that is of fundamental, even survival, importance to one company may be just a sideshow to the other. This will affect the resources — staff, money, and time — committed to the project.

When an alliance is of different priority to the participating partners, this does not necessarily doom it to fail. Rather, recognition of the differences in advance of alliance implementation will enable the partner for whom the project priority is highest, to adjust their activities and resources so that they will be doing all the work – not just their own work but often the work of the less interested partner. Recognition of varying project priorities should be cause to realign expectations and resource allocation.

The alliance can still become a success as long as the participants do not expect unrealistic and equal contributions from each other. If your priority is higher than your partner’s, it is reasonable to expect that you will contribute more.

Rule #5: Create an Alliance Implementation Plan that Has Legs.

A critical phase in creating the alliance implementation and operating plan is scenario building. In scenario building, the partners participate in simulations of what-ifs that could happen during the partnership. The importance of the scenario building process is that it is risk-free, since none of the scenario conditions and events have happened yet. In the scenario-building exercise, it is reasonable and safe to ask the kinds of questions that might not be asked in a real-life situation.

Rule #6: Identify the Leadership Characteristics that Your Partner’s Team Leader Must Have

Nothing will ruin a good alliance faster than a lack of leadership. If you have the wrong person at the helm, you will have challenges.

Make sure that you are wooing and getting to know — in many ways, not just via e-mail — the other team.

Ten Characteristics that Drive Alliance Success
In researching and writing my latest book, Dynamic Leader, Adaptive Organization: Ten Essential Traits for Managers, I identified the ten characteristics, which are both personal and organizational, that will drive alliance success:

1. Fearlessness,
2. Completion,
3. Commitment,
4. Inspiration,
5. Assuredness,
6. Penetration,
7. Intelligence,
8. Energy,
9. Integrity, and
10. Being in the customer’s head.

Rule #7: Conduct a Thorough Stakeholder Analysis

You must leverage the stakeholders in your alliance for every ounce of value whether internal or external to your alliance. You must leverage these relationships in order to get in front of the right people at the right time. Leveraging these stakeholders will ultimately derive the benefits for them that they collectively want for the success of the alliance. Is it easy? No.

Given the Spider Network many partners are rarely managed because they fall into nontraditional partner categories. These partners can be clearly identified only by conducting a stakeholder analysis. Conducting the stakeholder analysis will help you determine which stakeholder could sabotage the alliance.

You will then be able to create and implement a plan to satisfy or defuse these people so they do not come back to haunt you.

Rule #8: Manage Compatibility Challenges

Often partnering organizations are not similar in culture or lifecycle stages. More often they are in differing stages of growth – some in high growth others in decline. Managing corporate cultural differences is a significant challenge.

Through research into 235 companies, which I examined through my teaching of executive education on alliances at Caltech, I found that it was possible to anticipate organizational and managerial behavior by tracking the lifecycle stages of each partner.

This anticipatory knowledge gives all partners the opportunity to allocate resources and manage cultural differences without rancor. The recognition that different managerial personalities tend to thrive or struggle in different lifecycle stages also enables appropriate team selection in order to implement the alliance over time by changing team members and personalities to fit the circumstances. Country cultural issues in cross border alliances, add another dimension of complexity that will require managers with multi-cultural management skills.

By implementing the above 8 Golden Rules, you will be well on your way to alliance success.