Positive Leverage: Pressure That Doesn't Break Deals
Lead partners by capturing their internal motivation
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Most partnerships don’t fail because the strategy is bad. They fail because people treat partners like employees, try to use internal tactics externally, and then wonder why nothing moves. This is the core mistake most dealmakers make.
Internal Pressure vs External Reality
Everyone in business loves talking about “the stick and the carrot.”
Internally, the stick works because you control livelihoods. If you say, “Get this done or your performance review takes a hit,” people move. Fear is a functional (but crude) tool.
But with a partner? Completely different game.
Your deal is incremental to their business. If it dies, they still have revenue tomorrow. They don’t starve (yes, I’m being dramatic, but you get the point). They just move on. And this is why most people mismanage partnerships because they expect internal dynamics to work externally, and they never do.
Understanding that difference sets the stage for everything that follows.
The Honeymoon vs. The Messy Middle
The start of every partnership is magic: dinners, great photos, executives shaking hands like they’ve reinvented the industry, and high-fives before any real work happens.
It’s the infatuation stage. The easiest part. Everyone falls in love with the idea.
Then month three arrives. Now the rubber hits the road and there are teething issues, misalignment, overestimations, slow execution and more.
Suddenly the euphoria is gone and the mood shifts. A dashboard dips by 3% and people want to throw the entire deal in the bin. Escalate. Blame. Panic. Repeat.
This is the moment most partnerships die not because they can’t work, but because you’ve hit the messy middle and it’s extremely difficult to manage it.
Before you escalate, you have to understand what’s actually happening.
The First Rule of Partner Management
Before you rush to escalate, you need to get under the hood and understand what’s actually going on.
Is the partner struggling because of an actual capability gap?
A timing issue due to internal projects?
A resource constraint because they don’t have enough people?
Or is the friction coming from your own team — miscommunication, unrealistic expectations, or processes that slow everything down?
Sometimes the issue isn’t people at all, but a fundamental misalignment in how the two organisations operate.
Inside your own company, you can bang the table and force action because you control the levers. But outside? You don’t own their roadmap, their priorities, or their bandwidth and trying to manage them the same way is a guaranteed path to friction, not progress.
This is where most people reach for “leverage”… and often use it wrong.
The Most Misunderstood Tool in BD : Leverage
Most people think leverage is a threat. A bomb you keep hidden until the partner “steps out of line.” In theory it feels powerful. In reality it destroys trust and collapses momentum.
True leverage, which is the leverage that moves a partner who doesn’t report to you, is positive leverage. Instead of fear, providing meaning. Instead of pressure, you remind them of the upside.
And this isn’t philosophical. It’s rooted in actual psychology.
Why Positive Leverage Works (The SDT Link)
This is all rooted in science and specifically from Self Determination Theory (SDT), from Deci and Ryan, breaks human motivation into three needs:
Autonomy - “I have control.”
Competence - “I’m capable.”
Relatedness - “I’m connected.”
Every partnership issue mirrors these three needs. Positive leverage works because it strengthens them:
Give clearer choices → autonomy
Give resources/templates/tools → competence
Bring them in early, elevate their internal story → relatedness/status
When you hit these needs, people move not because they have to, but because they want to.
And that’s the only kind of leverage that works externally.
How Positive Leverage Works in Practice?
Start with their motivation as always. Before you move into timelines, deliverables, or pressure tactics, you need to understand the internal story that drove them to sign the deal in the first place.
Why did they agree to this partnership? What’s the real win for them, not just on paper but inside their organisation’s political economy? How does success get measured on their side, and who actually gets the glory if this lands? When you map that out, your negotiation becomes finely tuned.
You uncover the incentives, the personal stakes, and the internal champions who will push this forward when things slow down. That clarity becomes your power source which is the leverage that keeps the deal alive and aligned when everything else gets messy.
I’ve personally tested these phrases on the same deal at different points and the results were night and day. First, I used a direct, fear-based statement:
“We’re taking forever. My team is pressuring me. If you don’t fix this, we will have to escalate.”
It was fear, and fear collapses partnerships. The response? Minimal. Just a half-hearted, “Yes, we’ll get to it,” said to avoid escalation.
Later, faced with the same situation, I reframed it using positive leverage:
“If we don’t accelerate this now, your competitors will get ahead. We lose first-mover advantage in a space both our CEOs want us to lead. This is our moment so let’s move fast.”
Same message, totally different impact. The response:
“You’re right, we can’t let the competition beat us. We have to close this so we secure a first-mover advantage.”
By framing it through their world, not mine, I gave them clarity, meaning, urgency, upside, and the losses they risk. This aligned perfectly with SDT:
Competence: I can win here.
Autonomy: I choose to act.
Relatedness: This matters to people who matter to me.
When you activate all three, you’re not managing a task, you’re mobilising a person.
The Dealmakers Takeaway
A partnership doesn’t fail because it gets messy after a few months. It sometimes fails because people treat partners like an employee and use fear instead of leverage. I do understand sometimes it’s called for and it’s important to use those tactics (which do work in the short run).
I guess what I’m encouraging you to do is think longer term, because once you use positive leverage, it creates compounding value as you harness an individual’s need to express themselves.
The deal makers who win over the long term do the following really well:
1. They understand before they escalate.
2. They use positive leverage, not threats.
3. They manage meaning, not tasks.
This is ultimately how you lead people who don’t work for you and scale deals past the honeymoon phase. Once you master this, you’ll see your deal value compound exponentially.