It helps to anticipate potential barriers to working effectively with your partners. Some barriers are substantive, which means they involve financial, strategic, or technical issues. Other challenges are relationship-oriented. These issues might relate to leader compatibility, degree of trust, joint problem-solving capacity, or conflict resolution ability.
Other challenges that partnerships may face include turf battles among stakeholders, clashes between different organizational cultures, rigid policies regarding intellectual property, disputes over private sector engagement, inappropriate staffing and role assignments, the ups and downs of community politics, and member burnout. As the partnership evolves, partners must identify whatever barriers exist and work together to resolve them.