You put real effort into choosing your benefits advisor.Were you ever taught how to manage one?

Choosing an advisor is treated as an event — a search, an RFP, finalist meetings, a decision everyone weighs in on. Then the contract is signed, and the part that actually determines whether the relationship delivers — running it, over the years it lasts — gets almost none of that. No process. No method. No attention until something forces it.

And the most expensive failure isn't the loud one.

Your advisor should be proactive. Strategic. Bringing you what's coming before you ask — benchmarking you, challenging your assumptions, flagging the risk you haven't seen. That's the value you're paying for; it's why you hired an advisor and not a processor.

But plenty of relationships quietly settle into something smaller.

You ask, they deliver. You renew what exists. Nobody's upset — there may be no problems at all. And yet the strategic partner you're paying for has slowly become a competent vendor. The proactivity faded so gradually no one can point to the day it left.

That's the failure that's hardest to catch, because nothing is technically wrong.

No crisis, no complaint to file. Just a relationship running a level below where it should be — and a quiet sense you're not getting the thinking you're paying for.

Here's the part that matters: when you feel that, most leaders don't know how to pull the relationship back up. And that's not a personal failing — it's a training gap.

Your advisor was trained in managing the client relationship; it's their profession. You were almost certainly never trained in managing them back, because that training doesn't really exist on the client side of the table. Selection gets a process. Everything after gets improvised.

That's the gap we've been working on lately.

So I'll ask the people who live it:

Is your advisor relationship as strategic as you need it to be? And has anyone ever actually taught you how to manage it there?

First in a series on managing the advisors your organization depends on — choosing them, keeping them sharp, and knowing when to reset.