Partnering/Multi-Party Management

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Team building is the process of turning a group of individuals into a cohesive team. Typically team building is a group event of several days duration away from the office, facilitated by a third-party, during which a team focuses on:

 

• aligning around goals

• building effective working relationships

• clarifying team members' roles

• finding solutions to team problems

 

Creighton personally conducted more than 30 team-building sessions for governmental clients including the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bonneville Power Administration, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and private sector clients such as Wells Fargo Bank, Aristosoft, Kanisha and Optics Technology. Creighton also worked the with training staff at the Bureau of Reclamation, Mid-Pacific Region, to develop and implement an extensive program to train internal facilitators to conduct team-building sessions throughout the Bureau, training approximately 25 internal facilitators over a three-year period.

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In the 1990s, with the proven success of team building, interest shifted to situations where multiple stakeholders needed to work together to meet shared goals. This led to Partnering. Partnering is a formal management process in which all parties to a project voluntarily agree at the outset to adopt a cooperative, team-based approach to project development and problem resolution to eliminate -- or at least reduce -- conflicts, litigation, and claims. While partnering can be applied to any working relationship, it has become a common practice on large construction projects both within and outside of government. Agencies or owners, architect-engineers, construction managers, building contractors, and subcontractors all have their own priorities -- providing a potential breeding ground for conflict. Partnering helps avoid unproductive 'positioning' by generating an environment of cooperation and trust. It can also be applied to situations where multiple government entities, federal, state or local, have to work together to reach common goals.

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Creighton developed a partnering guide for environmental missions of the Air Force, Army, and Navy, and later developed a partnering guide for the US Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works Mission.

 

Subsequently Creighton worked with a multi-agency team to develop a Joint Stewardship Training, a training course for Department of Defense (DoD) services and natural resource agencies with shared responsibilities for managing natural resources on DoD training facilities​.

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