When to leave a business relationship

There’s no right or wrong time to leave a business relationship. There are a plethora of situations where it makes sense to part ways, but far more where you can work things out and turn the tide in your toxic business relationship. At the end of the day, relationships are about people, and too often we allow our egos to get in the way of reaching common ground and working things out.

Negativity in a relationship is often an outward expression of an internal struggle. That struggle might range from feeling like you’re carrying more weight than your partner to a simple misunderstanding about the tone of an email. The first step to know when to leave a business relationship and when to stay is setting aside your ego and detaching from your current situation.

Toxic Business Relationships and Negativity In A Business Relationship

Most of us were not gifted with a discernable understanding of when something is truly toxic and when something is just uncomfortable. There are real situations when a work environment or a leader can be toxic, we’ve seen it ourselves, but most of the time we’ve found it all boils down to ego.
As you detach from your ego and your situation, you start to see things for how they are, not the stories you’ve been telling yourself. This is a fundamental part of knowing when to leave a business relationship and when to stay.

This space provides you the clarity and understanding of what is truly going on, and the opportunity to do some self-assessment on your own to see where you could have handled things differently. At Echelon Front, we call this taking ownership. You might call it accountability, but ownership is different. It’s coming to the realization that everything in your life is within your locus of control. You have the ability to move the needle in either direction because your ownership empowers you.

Extreme Ownership & Bad Business Relationships

Taking extreme ownership of your bad business relationships means identifying where you could have stepped up and where you let things fall through the cracks. It means taking feedback from your partner and understanding how you led to this miscommunication, problem, or issue, even if at the moment you don’t feel like you did anything wrong.

Extreme Ownership allows you to control a bad situation and make it an empowering moment for you and your organization. Oftentimes, when one individual takes ownership, the other party recognizes that olive branch and offers their own.

Are there times when you need to assess and recognize that things aren’t going to work out? Absolutely. In our best-selling book The Dichotomy of Leadership, we have an entire chapter dedicated to “When To Mentor and When To Fire.” Not all problems are going to be resolved between two people, but ownership will always empower you to make the right decision.

Toxic business relationships, negativity in business relationships, any relationship can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate without the right framework. That’s why we’ve developed a relationships course to help individuals, teams, organizations, and business partners learn how to build, deepen, and maintain relationships across the board.

If you’re wondering when to leave a business relationship, check out our online academy to learn the steps you can take today to make a difference before cutting ties. You’ll be surprised how much can shift with a shift in your perspective. Sign up today!