Strategy Is Only as Strong as Your Relationships

Are your relationships strong enough to keep your strategy moving forward?

This is the question I have been asking my coaching clients lately, and it is revealing a familiar pattern. Whether you are in the C-suite, an SVP, VP, Director, or a high-impact individual contributor, you are leading in a climate of uncertainty and pressure to outperform your last cycle. In these conditions, your attention naturally concentrates on the most urgent and highest-stakes priorities.

When the immediate crowds out the important, even the strongest leaders can let critical partnerships slip outside their sphere of influence. The impact often shows up as cross-functional friction, slower decision-making, strained collaboration, and unnecessary bottlenecks on your most important initiatives. If this sounds familiar, it may be a sign that your key stakeholder relationships are drifting.

Before those gaps become a real risk to you or your business, it helps to take an honest look at the health of your stakeholder relationships and intentionally reset the ones that have started to weaken.

Here are a few practical suggestions to consider:

CEOs & C-Suite Executives: Reconnect with key front-line team members beyond Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support. Conduct listening sessions with individual contributors across Engineering, IT, HR, Finance, and Operations to understand what is hindering faster AI value creation.

VPs: Assess the strength of your partnership with HR Business Partners, Learning and Development, Change Management, and Internal Communications. Bring these teams into your inner circle before you need them. Early collaboration will accelerate 2026 initiatives and reduce friction at "go time".

Directors: Do not wait for a crisis to build relationships with PR and Marketing, Legal, Compliance, Risk, IT, and Procurement. These partners protect your brand, surface emerging risks, and are strongest when engaged by proactive business leaders.

Strengthening these relationships is not a heavy lift. It simply takes an intentional plan, an authentic desire to collaborate, and a consistent rhythm of connection.

Here is a practical four-step process for rebooting stakeholder relationships:

The Relationship Reboot Process

1. Inventory Your Stakeholders
   Start by mapping your ecosystem, including executives, peers, team members, customers, and partners. Include the prominent players and those who influence outcomes behind the scenes.

2. Assess the Relationships
   Look at each stakeholder through two lenses: their importance to your success and your significance to theirs. Then make an honest call on the current level of trust: high, medium, or low. This is less about perfection and more about awareness. If you are not sure, that is a strong signal there; there's some work to be done.

3. Create an Engagement Plan
   Decide where to invest time and energy. Strong relationships need to be sustained, mid-level ones deserve intentional attention, and weaker ties may require a fresh start. Write down a few specific actions for each group.

4. Execute the Plan and Build Routines.
   Build these actions into your weekly and monthly routines. Consistency matters more than intensity. Keep at it: nurture the “highs,” elevate the “mediums,” and repair or reignite the “lows.” Along the way, demonstrate a few simple but powerful behaviors:

• Be direct: approach conversations with clarity and no hidden agenda.

• Be authentic: own it if you have let the relationship slide.

• Ask questions: “What can I do to be a better partner to you and your team?”

• Listen openly: show a willingness to be influenced by what you hear.

• Show appreciation: acknowledge both feedback and partnership contributions. Bridging the Trust Gap 🔗 CDBGlobalPartners.com

Reach out to Colleen for support on how to customize your reboot strategy to your leadership goals.

colleen@cdbglobalpartner.com