Partnerships have become a mechanism promoted, that businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should more often adopt in order to achieve more sustainable goals by working together. Partnerships can address complex social problems that no sector alone can address effectively. The key ingredients for a more sustainable future through partnership building may very well be rooted in the complex layers of neuroscience, nevertheless within the reach of everyone. The research at hand focuses on defining the relationship between social and emotional intelligence (EI), as well as, how age and gender affect partnership building.

A triangulation method research was implemented on 55 Finnish partnership professionals, of which 43 were female and 12 males, using Six Seconds emotional intelligence assessment (SEI) online survey to measure the emotional intelligence skills of partnership professionals. The sample population was interviewed to link the partnership building statistics and EI statistics for implementing a Pearson´s chi-squared test of independence for the dimensions of EI skills, partnership building statistics, gender and age. People with an average level of emotional intelligence were the most likely to build successful partnerships 86%. The sample populations with the highest level of EI skills surprisingly had a lower percentage 76% and people with low EI only 4%. Age was found to be a significant factor in partnerships building presenting the youngest population group between the ages of 21-39 as the most active in building successful partnerships. The study also found that women built more partnerships than men.