You get to a certain level in the organisation and you realise you are spending a disproportionate amount of time in meetings that no one wants to be at, that participants think is not best use of their time and very little is achieved. I would go further than that and say nothing is achieved, positions are restated, we agree to differ, a game of my budget cuts are bigger than yours is mildly diverting, a chance to correct the impression created in the media or point out that the latest restructuring means not sure who will be responsible for what by the next time we meet.

If this sounds too negative all I can say is that as a senior manager in a large complex organisation I spent way too many whole day get togethers with the senior management teams of Partner agencies and a large part of my working week in regular strategic meetings with provider organisations  to say nothing of the joint conferences which fail to agree a common set of priorities or a shared vision in anything but the broadest sense. 

You had to go to show willing and a commitment to joint working at a strategic level if your senior management team was not well represented then you lost in the game of its not our fault.

One key  partner agency in particular had a senior management team that  was totally dysfunctional so we redoubled our efforts! Another thought we were too peripheral to their business to bother with although they routinely blamed us for problems they were experiencing.

I came to think that this was not about how to make strategic partnership meetings work but whether we needed them at all. My boss came to the same conclusion, the away days and joint senior management team meetings were discontinued, the director had a regular informal one to ones with the chief executive of each partner agency to “touch base” and the relevant senior manager met with their operational counter part as and when. So let’s work together but let’s not see so much of each other.