Tag Archives: Best Practices

Eat, Pray, Partner – Lessons in Network Facilitation

Tuvya Zaretsky and Bodil Skjøtt share the history of the Lausanne Consultations on Jewish Evangelism (LCJE) Network and discuss strong facilitation teams, resisting organizational thinking, and creating trust…

Tool: Key Factors Mapping

This is a simple but effective group method for quickly identifying the factors that have the most influence or impact on addressing a given challenge. It pushes a group to think harder about what’s really holding back progress…

Tool: Network Consultation Report Template

It is extremely easy for members and leaders of networks and partnership to “recall” the content of a consultation or conference in widely diverging ways. visionSynergy recommends that network and partnership leadership create a Summary Report that can serve as a common data set, or shared referent, for all members. Below is a consultation summary report template that you can use to share key event decisions, details, and information with your members and stakeholders…

Readiness for Partnership – Russ Simons

In this Leadership Lesson video, Russ Simons discusses the importance of being ready to partner and not rushing the exploration stage. He discusses how the exploration stage can often feel like a waste of time, but that this phase is a critical part of preparing to partner…

3 Mantras + 3 Small Moves for Advancing Networks

Net work can be complex and messy. At the same time, there is something profoundly intuitive, grounding and humanizing about the web of relationships we work in. Here are a few mantras and small moves to help network leaders build new connections…

Tool: How To Give Advice The Right Way

Have you ever been frustrated when people ignore your advice? Or have you been frustrated when people in your organization, partnership, or network simply stop asking for your advice? In this video, productivity consultant Ed Muzio explains a four-step process for giving advice the right way. Using this approach will make it more likely that people will not only come to you for advice, but even more so that your advice will actually be helpful to them…

The Partnership Field Guide

The Partnership Field Guide (PFG) is a free 100-page resource that outlines the step-by-step process for developing effective mission partnerships. Based on nearly 30 years of work with mission networks and partnerships around the world, the Guide includes a section on “Partnership Theology” and a detailed overview of 15 key principles that power high-impact partnerships…

What Great Listeners Actually Do

In this Harvard Business Review article, the authors share their research about the four key things that great listeners (and leaders) do differently.

5 First Year Networking Lessons

Ellen Livingood shares five lessons she learned / relearned as a founding member and leader of a diaspora outreach network in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In this article, she reflects on the networking challenges — common to many networks — that they encountered their first year of operation.

Six Characteristics of High-Performance Networks

If we are investing time in a network as a leader or participant, wouldn’t we prefer that our network operate with excellence and its efforts land right on target? High-performance networks don’t happen accidentally; they are marked by specific characteristics that set them apart…

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