the handshake meeting e-book is now available
If you’re a business leader navigating growth, complexity, change, or high-stakes collaboration, you know results depend not just on what gets done, but on how people work together.
Breakdowns happen not because leaders lack talent or commitment, but because partnerships lack clarity, truth, and shared ownership. Misalignment slows decisions, erodes trust, and quietly drains momentum, even among high performers.
Enter The Handshake Meeting—a practical leadership guide for building high-trust, high-performing partnerships across roles, teams, and organizations.
Drawing on her Fortune 50 leadership experience and years of coaching and advising senior leaders, bestselling author of Who Has Your Back: Get the Support You Need From the Chief of Staff You Deserve, Laurie Arron, introduces a proven framework to align expectations, address tension early, and create the conditions for fast, confident, and sustainable execution in your most critical partnerships.
When partnerships are intentionally designed, work moves faster, decisions improve, and pressure eases. The Handshake Meeting is your go-to guide for prioritizing and nurturing your most critical business relationships, so progress, performance, and impact compound over time.
"In a world where trust is talked about constantly, but rarely built with intention, The Handshake Meeting offers a practical and powerful path forward. Laurie Arron shows that high performance doesn’t start with strategy—it starts with clarity, candor, and shared commitment. This book is a smart, actionable guide for any leader who wants to strengthen partnerships, accelerate results, and build the kind of trust that truly lasts.”
— Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is the Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and New York Times bestselling author of The Earned Life, Triggers, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
Turn Critical Partnerships into an Execution Advantage
This straightforward, actionable guidebook will empower you to:
Create shared clarity that eliminates friction and operational drag
Build trust through direct, respectful truth-telling
Establish a repeatable rhythm for accountability and follow-through
Accelerate decision-making without sacrificing alignment
Reset strained communication before performance suffers
Turn strong working relationships into durable performance engines
pRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“As an investor, I’ve learned that the biggest execution risk is rarely the market or the product - it’s relationships.
Laurie Arron’s Handshake Meeting framework is a powerful way to surface assumptions early and build the kind of trust that holds under pressure.
If you’re building anything that matters, this is a discipline you want in how you operate as a founder, an executive, and especially as a leader.”
— Yousuf Khan, Entrepreneur & investor
“I’ve watched The Handshake Meeting change how leaders work together in real time. When expectations are clear and unspoken assumptions are brought into the open, trust builds quickly — and execution follows. Laurie Arron has captured something incredibly powerful: a way for leaders to have the conversations that accelerate decision-making and prevent misalignment before it costs time, energy, and relationships. I’ve seen this approach transform top-level partnerships with immediate impact, even under pressure. This is a book leaders will return to again and again.”
— Jamie Shapiro, Organizational psychologist & Ceo coach
“If two leaders can’t tell the truth to each other, no strategy will save them. Laurie Arron has turned trust into a powerful practice. The Handshake Meeting is how partnerships become unstoppable.”
— Rich Litvin, High Performance Coach and best-selling author of The Prosperous Coach
“The way people interact with each other can either sabotage an organization or a relationship or send it to new heights. Through Laurie Arron’s tried-and-true approach in The Handshake Meeting, everyone can ensure that new heights become the norm, not the exception. Laurie has an art of simplifying and offers the reader a step-by-step approach to developing healthy, productive partnerships. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from Laurie’s coaching, and I know her philosophy will help you regardless of how strong or weak your partnerships are today. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I do and take this “Handshake” approach into all of your relationships.”
— Jack Baum, Chairman & ceo ziosk
About The Book
About THe AUthor
Laurie Arron is the founder of Arron Coaching LLC, a Dallas-based executive coaching firm that advises C-suite leaders and Chiefs of Staff on building high-trust, high-performing partnerships. She is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council and has been recognized by Influence Digest as one of the Top 20 Executive Coaches in Dallas.
After more than 27 years at AT&T, including serving in various multi-dimensional leadership roles, including Chief of Staff to senior executives, Laurie developed a deep, practical understanding of how trust, power, and execution intersect in high-stakes environments. Her career has been shaped by working inside the relationships where alignment is not optional, and missteps are costly.
Today, Laurie serves as an executive coach and trusted adviser to senior leaders navigating complexity, change, and critical partnerships. Her work focuses on creating clarity, disciplined truth-telling, and shared accountability so that partnerships become a sustained advantage in execution.
Laurie is an ICF-certified executive coach through the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and a member of Litvin 4PC, an invitation-only community of elite coaches.