Picture a relay race where nobody trains for the handoff. Every runner is fast, every runner is committed, and yet the baton keeps hitting the track, because everyone assumed someone else knew when to pass it.
That’s most organizations, most quarters: individually brilliant, yet collectively fumbling because the core problem isn’t the effort. It’s the handoffs.
The handoffs are where it fell apart.
You’ve lived this. The initiative that had full executive buy-in in January and full-blown finger-pointing by June. Not because anyone stopped trying—everyone was still running as hard as they could—but because Product optimized for one thing, Delivery optimized for another, and Finance found out about both roughly three weeks after the numbers stopped making sense. Everyone did their job well; the handoffs are where it fell apart.
The feeling that comes with this is oddly specific. Rather than being the satisfying exhaustion of a hard problem solved, it’s the low-grade, simmering kind that comes from watching real effort evaporate into a swirl of “Wait, who owns this?” It shows up as extra meetings that exist only to re-explain decisions that were supposedly made two weeks ago. It’s the sense that you’d better cc three more people, just in case, because trust has quietly become something you route around rather than rely on. Nobody names it directly. but everyone feels it by Thursday.
Collaboration doesn’t erode because people are lazy or difficult.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: this almost never traces back to the strategy. Strategies are usually fine: sensible, well-reasoned, and occasionally even inspiring in the room where they were approved. What breaks is what happens after the room empties: the actual collaboration required to turn a plan into a result. Collaboration doesn’t erode because people are lazy or difficult. It erodes because somewhere upstream, a leader treated relationships as background noise rather than something to actively manage.
Strategy is a document; execution is a relationship.
That’s the real story behind most “delivery” problems. Weeks are spent getting the strategy right and about zero minutes are spent getting the relationships right. Then people act baffled when the beautifully sequenced plan collapses at the first handoff. While an org chart tells who reports to whom, it says nothing about who actually trusts whom, who’s still quietly annoyed about last year’s reorganization, or which two teams have developed an, unspoken rivalry that nobody scheduled but everyone can feel. Strategy is a document; execution is a relationship. Only one of those gets rehearsed.
This is precisely the gap the Leading with Relationships course was built to close. It treats organizational relationship management as a real leadership discipline and not a knack some people are simply born with or a stack of scripted phrases for the next tense stakeholder call. It’s the deliberate, learnable skill of reading a room and noticing tension before it becomes a problem, understanding what different stakeholders actually need to feel confident handing off the baton, and leading through the friction before it becomes a missed deadline.
The advantage of organizational relationship management as a real leadership discipline.
Catch misalignment in week one instead of discovering it in a postmortem. Their handoffs hold under pressure, because the trust behind them was built on purpose, not assumed by default. Their meetings start to be about decisions, not the archaeology of decisions everyone thought had already been made.
None of this appears anywhere on a strategy slide, but it’s usually the entire difference between a plan that may get applause and one that crosses the finish line.
If your team keeps dropping the baton at the handoff, that’s not a speed problem. It’s a leadership one, and it can be taught. Get in touch to learn more about Leading with Relationships.
Lead and Succeed
Our coaches, Elka Schrijver and Peter Lijnse, have both won the prestigious Arnie Award from the Business Relationship Management (BRM) Institute for their work to embody, enhance, and promote business relationship management knowledge throughout the global BRM community. They have been actively involved in the BRM Institute since it was founded in 2013 and have been contributing authors for several components of the BRM Body of Knowledge and certification courses. They are currently writing a series of practical, user-friendly books about mastering business relationship management leadership skills.