Financial Dashboards Tell You What Happened. A Relationship Dashboard Tells You What Is About to Happen.

Every quarter, executive teams gather to review the health of their business or organization.

Revenue.

Margins.

Cash flow.

Sales pipeline.

Customer satisfaction.

Operational performance.

These dashboards are indispensable.

They tell us whether we are winning.

But they all have one thing in common.

They tell us what has already happened.

After spending more than three decades helping organizations build strategic partnerships, integrate acquisitions, and lead transformational initiatives, I've become convinced that one of the biggest blind spots for many executives is the management of one of their organization's most valuable assets.

Strategic Relationships.

Partnerships, alliances, supplier relationships, and strategic collaborations often determine an organization's future. Yet they receive far less disciplined management than finance, operations, or sales. Even mergers and acquisitions receive enormous attention before they close, yet surprisingly little disciplined relationship management after integration begins.

We assume that if smart people are involved, strategic relationships will take care of themselves.

Unfortunately, they rarely do.

Strategic relationships rarely fail because of a single event.

They fail because the structure supporting them has gradually weakened until it can no longer support the increasing demands placed upon it.

Executive sponsorship weakens.

Shared vision becomes unclear.

Short-term priorities no longer contribute to long-term objectives.

Communication.

Decision-making.

Financial management.

Understanding one another's organizations.

Hundreds of small abrasions begin weakening the structure that supports the relationship. None of those warning signs appear on a financial dashboard.

Financial dashboards simply aren't designed to measure them.

Peter Drucker famously observed,

"What gets measured gets managed."

Yet few organizations measure the health of their most important strategic relationships.

What executives need is a Relationship Dashboard.

Financial Dashboards tell you what happened.

A Relationship Dashboard tells you what is about to happen.

Strategic relationships are not soft issues.  They are strategic infrastructure.

Their purpose is to support the flow of value between organizations.

Like any critical infrastructure, they require intentional design, disciplined management, and regular measurement.

The organizations that learn to measure the health of their strategic relationships before problems appear will have a competitive advantage over those that wait for financial dashboards to tell them what has already happened.