High-agency professionals constantly add new relationships: direct reports, cross-functional partners, vendors, advisors, and now AI assistants. Most of those relationships start with vague expectations and hopeful chemistry—then slowly drift into misalignment, rework, or underuse. This episode introduces the “Executive Handshake Brief”: a one-page, 10-minute artifact you create at the start of any important relationship that makes collaboration operational, not aspirational. You’ll learn a three-move model—Define, Design, Deploy. First, Define: capture why this relationship exists in business terms—decisions, outcomes, and constraints—not generic rapport. Second, Design: specify how you’ll actually work together week-to-week—channels, cadences, decision rights, and failure modes to avoid. Third, Deploy: share and refine the brief with the other party (or encode it into AI prompts) until it becomes the shared operating contract. By the end, you’ll have a repeatable way to make every new relationship—especially with AI—productive faster, with less ambiguity and fewer painful resets. Clarity is leverage; this is how you embed it at the moment of first contact.