The New Manager’s "Baby Blues"
Whether you've just taken on a management role or welcomed a newborn, the initial shock is the same. You were expecting to receive a secret instruction manual.
We often talk about business relationships as a lever for collaboration, trust, and value creation. And that’s true. But it’s also a somewhat comfortable way of looking at them.
Because a business relationship isn’t always smooth, harmonious, and positive. It can also be heavy, ambiguous, or unequal. Loaded with unspoken expectations, vague promises, accumulated wounds, poorly acknowledged dependencies, and frustrations that have been politely buried.
In many organizations, relationships don’t break all at once. They go into debt.
They become indebted every time a commitment is only half-made. Every time an expectation remains implicit. Every time a real issue is avoided to preserve harmony. Every time an internal partner says “yes” even though they don’t truly believe in it. Every time a leader thinks they have gained buy-in when all they have really gained is a lack of opposition.
A director presents their plan at an extended team meeting. No one asks questions. No one challenges the timeline. Two weeks later, the project is falling behind: three people had serious reservations, but none of them expressed them in front of the group.
And one day, the organization discovers that it is paying the interest.
Projects slow down. Decisions go around in circles. Teams protect themselves. Partners become cautious. Meetings multiply, but the important conversations remain absent. We think we have a problem with execution, priorities, or communication. In reality, we are often inheriting an accumulated relational deficit.
A common mistake is to think of a business relationship simply as a communication channel between two stakeholders. As if the strategic leader’s role were merely to share information, clarify expectations, and facilitate collaboration.
But a business relationship is rarely neutral. It always contains some degree of influence, power, credibility, dependency, and risk. Some people depend on others’ decisions. Some teams control critical resources. Some partners can accelerate or block a project without ever openly saying they oppose it. Some relationships are officially collaborative but unofficially distrustful.
This is where BRM (Business Relationship Management) becomes more than a collaboration skill. It becomes a strategic clarity skill.
A BRM-oriented leader doesn’t only ask, “Who do I need to inform?” They ask, “Who can make what we are trying to build succeed, slow it down, transform it, or put it at risk?” And that is not the same question!
The first leads to a communication list. The second leads to a reading of the system.
In many workplaces, harmonious relationships are highly valued. We want to be pleasant, collaborative, open, positive. There’s nothing wrong with that. Except that harmony can sometimes become an avoidance strategy. We then confuse a good relationship with a relationship without tension.
Except that harmony can sometimes become an avoidance strategy.
We then confuse a good relationship with a relationship without tension.
A mature business relationship is not one where everyone agrees. It is one where important tensions can be expressed early enough, clearly enough, and respectfully enough to prevent them from becoming roadblocks.
The true test of a business relationship is not the quality of the interactions when everything is going well. It is the quality of the conversations when interests diverge.
Silos are often presented as problems that need to be dismantled. That makes sense. They slow collaboration, limit the flow of information, and undermine organizational alignment. But a silo can sometimes be a form of protection.
An IT team that once freely shared its priorities stopped doing so after an urgent project, added without consultation, derailed its quarter. Since then, every new request has gone through an official form. It’s slower, but it’s protected.
A team closes itself off because it has been asked for input too many times without ever truly being heard. A department protects its territory because it has learned that collaboration can sometimes mean losing control. A partner becomes rigid because they have experienced too many vague commitments. An internal function imposes its rules because it no longer trusts others’ judgment.
In other words, silos aren’t always created by people who refuse to collaborate. Sometimes, they are created by people who have learned to defend themselves.
The BRM-oriented leader therefore doesn’t simply say, “We need to work better together.” They seek to understand: “What is each stakeholder trying to protect?”
That question transforms judgment into diagnosis and makes it possible to move from frustration to strategy.
We often talk about trust as if it were a pleasant emotion between two people. Yet, in an organization, trust functions much more like infrastructure.
It allows information to move faster. It reduces the cost of verification. It makes decisions more fluid. It makes disagreements less threatening. It allows people to take calculated risks without turning every discussion into a defensive negotiation.
When trust is strong, teams don’t need to lock everything down. But when trust is weak, everything becomes heavy. This isn’t just a question of atmosphere. It’s a question of strategic speed.
A manager rereads every email before sending it to a partner, copies colleagues “just in case,” and documents every decision in a discussion thread, not because they are excessively rigorous, but because a difference in interpretation six months earlier came back to hurt them.
An organization that lacks trust doesn’t simply become less pleasant. It becomes slower, more costly, and less capable of learning.
“Trust is the new currency of our interdependent, collaborative world.” — Stephen M.R. Covey
The word “political” often makes people uncomfortable. It is associated with backroom games, hidden alliances, manipulation, or self-serving behaviour.
But there is a healthy form of political acumen: the ability to understand interests, fears, dependencies, spheres of influence, and the conditions required for buy-in within a complex human system. This is exactly where BRM becomes powerful.
Managing a business relationship isn’t simply about getting along with the right people. It means knowing how to read the environment. It means understanding who is truly affected by a decision. It means anticipating reactions. It means detecting resistance before it hardens. It means creating the conversations that need to happen before positions become public and rigid.
The BRM leader does not seek to manipulate the system. They seek to make it more transparent, more coherent, and more capable of acting.
In many organizations, the answer could be “yes”. People are respectful, meetings run smoothly, and interactions are professional. But that isn’t enough.
The real question should be: “Do our relationships make us more courageous, faster, and collectively smarter?”
Perhaps the leader’s role isn’t only to mobilize, align, and deliver. Perhaps an important part of their role is to reduce the relational debt around them.
This work is rarely spectacular. It doesn’t always feel like progress is happening quickly. It may even seem less urgent than the operational tasks at hand. But it often determines an organization’s true ability to move forward without exhausting itself.
Because, ultimately, many projects don’t die from a lack of ideas, talent, or ambition. They die from an accumulation of neglected relationships.
Reducing that debt doesn’t require a major initiative. It often starts with a single question, asked this week, to a single relationship that weighs on you a little: “What have we never dared to say to each other?”
This isn’t a question of risk management. It’s an invitation to create, a little more often, the space where the real conversations can take place.
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