Most family offices manage external manager relationships the way they were built — on trust, familiarity, and periodic conversation. That may work well for selecting managers. It works less well for holding them accountable over time. The discipline required to evaluate managers systematically, apply pre-agreed criteria, and act on the results is just as important as the judgment required to select them in the first place. Institutions developed that capability deliberately. The infrastructure to apply it at family office scale now exists.
