Our Mission:
Towards a Partnering Economic Paradigm

The need for professional partnering leadership is more critical than ever — across geopolitical landscapes as much as business arenas.

It is becoming increasingly visible that under competitive, hierarchical leadership models, we create advantages at the expense of humanity, social peace, and the planet’s resources.

The Partnering Leadership Academy is committed to fostering a relational management paradigm that supports sustainable and inclusive stakeholder capitalism — grounded in a new We-consciousness.

Walls turned sideways are bridges

Angela Davis

Understanding Partnering Leadership

Leadership, rewritten: Design conditions, not just behaviors

Partnering leadership goes beyond leading a team for good collaboration. It’s about intentionally designing the conditions — principles, routines, structures, and even digital features — that enable the creation of relational value across a collective.

The leaders' task no1 is to become a relational architect.

Hierarchical Leadership

  • Focuses on leading individuals or teams

  • Often depends on strong personalities or roles

  • Works within defined hierarchies

  • Prioritizes motivation, coordination and control

  • Collaboration as a skill

  • Bases on structure

Partnering Leadership

  • Focuses on enabling collective engagement

  • Anchors trust and collaboration in routine and process design

  • Works across boundaries and ecosystems

  • Prioritizes bridge building, shared commitment and responsibility

  • Collaboration as a system design responsibility

  • Bases on principles

Why Partnering Leadership Matters

It makes digital and sustainable business models work

Our new digital and circular business models are partner-to-partner models. They require a co-creative value generation among all partners, including a fair distribution thereof.

Business partnerships have increased by 20% and continue to grow

In a digital networked economy, companies will continue to evolve further and further towards a purpose-driven ecosystem. This will include multiple partnerships with other businesses, the public and even competitors.

Effective partnerships are not a question of money

Failure of large projects with multiple partners inside and outside of companies mostly stems from lack of trust, not from the lack of funding. A Partnering Leadership approach is a big part of the solution to this.

Partnering leadership accelerates speed

Time is one of the most valuable resources any individual and business has. Mutual trust is the most important ingredient in collective partnerships. It accelerates speed that so often gets lost in the process of lengthy debates on contracting. 

Partnering leadership is agile leadership

Without collaboration among leaders, any transformation fails. Leaders who enable effective collaboration and co-creation among different partners also enable collective thinking, learning and co-creation processes.

Partnering leadership enables New Work

Leading in partnering ways creates relational bonds and identification across functional, hierarchical and geographical boundaries of a distributed, hybrid workforce.

Why choosing Partnering Leadership Academy

We’ve walked the path

grounded in 15+ years of hands-on experience supporting hundreds of leaders in organizations across diverse industries.

We build on a solid framework

rooted in a proven, research-based methodology for holistically transforming leadership cultures.

We go beyond behaviors

viewing leadership as the intentional design capacity to shape routines, processes, structures, and digital enablers that allow scaling trust-based collaboration.

Meet The Founder

Dr. oec. Eva Bilhuber Galli

Eva is a multi-stakeholder engagement expert, senior consultant, executive coach, lecturer, author, and founder of the Partnering Leadership Academy.

Over the past 15+ years, she has supported hundreds of global leaders across sectors and industries in shifting toward a partnering leadership culture — helping them move beyond silo-thinking, matrix inertia, and power struggles toward greater agility, trust, and collaboration.

Having experienced firsthand how competitive “win-lose” dynamics can harm collaboration, productivity, and wellbeing, Eva began researching the social conditions that enable successful boundary-spanning collaboration. This work led to the development of the Partnering Maturity Model.

She received her PhD in strategic management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and her insights have since been published in Leadership Quarterly, Harvard Business Manager, NZZ Libro, and Handelsblatt Verlag.

Profile Eva Bilhuber Galli

Publications Eva Bilhuber Galli

Our Methodology

From dialogue to design: A Model for scalable collaboration

Our evidence-based Partnering Maturity Model is the foundation of all our programs.
It guides you through a clear, structured process to help you envision, align, reflect, and evaluate your efforts toward more effective collaboration.

Whether at a personal, team, or organizational level, we show you how to apply the model in your own context — growing your leadership capacity as:

  • a Partnering Leader

  • a Partnering Culture

  • or a Partnering Organization

The Founder's Story

My personal why

Since the beginning of my career in the financial industry, I often felt lost in — and even shut down by — competitive work dynamics. Like many, I was encouraged to become bolder, more assertive, and to fight harder for my own interests.

But the more I tried, the more I felt a growing discomfort — a sense of emptiness, exhaustion, and inner disconnect from having to fight “me first” battles in the name of business success.

It took turning fifty to realize there was never anything wrong with me desiring more partnering ways of working and doing business.
What felt more and more wrong was blindly following a century-old “competitive imperative” — one that taught us to suppress our collaborative human nature in favor of system-driven win-lose dynamics.

For too long, we’ve focused on perfecting competitive leadership, instead of questioning the paradigm behind it.

That needs to change.
That’s why I devote my work to elevating, researching, testing, and teaching a more partnering form of leadership — one that allows us to shape a sustainable future for people, organizations, and humanity as a whole that we share.

Grounded in 15 Years Experience

Meet Human Facts AG — the company powering the Partnering Leadership Academy

Who we are - Human Facts is a Swiss-based boutique consultancy with over 15 years of experience in organization-wide transformation and multi-stakeholder engagement.

What we do differently - We help organizations to lead change through a partnering leadership approach — building trust, alignment, and shared responsibility across entire systems.

Why we founded the Academy - The Partnering Leadership Academy was created to share this expertise more broadly — offering tools, programs, and peer learning to individual changemakers creating conditions for partnering mastery.

We are a certified Women-Owned Business and a 1% for the Planet member — as is the Partnering Leadership Academy.

www.human-facts.com