Many of us go to work with a simple rule in mind: keep it professional. Work is where we get things done, and personal relationships belong somewhere else. We can experience this even more strongly as leaders, since getting close to the people in our care might seem like a risk to fairness or objectivity. On top of that, there’s rarely extra time in our day for anything that isn’t on our agenda.
Part of our hesitation comes from picturing connection as something more personal than it needs to be. In reality, workplace relationships come in more than one form. Some are working relationships, built around what we need from others to achieve excellence. Others might turn into friendships that carry over into weekends and life outside the office. Somewhere in between is the kind of relationship Connected Leadership depends on: we know each person on our team as an individual, without the relationship crossing professional lines.
The reality is that the people we lead aren’t looking to us for friendship. However, they do look to us as leaders who understand and respect them, and these are the connections we’re responsible for building.
Self-Assessment: Connected Leadership
Please take a few moments to reflect on the following questions. Where can you identify opportunities for growth in your leadership?
Could I name something each person on my team cares about?
Do the people I lead know anything about me beyond my title and my expectations?
When someone brings me an idea I disagree with, do I let them finish before I respond?
In the past month, have I given someone a chance to utilize a strength I know they have?
When I ask for input, does everyone on the team get a real chance to be heard, including the softer voices?
Is there someone on my team I’ve formed an opinion about without ever asking more about them?
If I listed the people I talk with most, would they look a lot like me?
Would someone on my team tell me if they thought I was making a mistake?
This self-assessment is a starting point for understanding Connected Leadership. Reflect on your responses, identify areas for growth, and use feedback from others and your ECFL Leadership Coach to guide your development.
Leadership requires us to take a genuine interest in the people we lead. We may know someone’s job title and what they do daily without knowing much about them as a person. The better we understand someone, the more we learn about what’s important to them and what they may need from us as a leader, along with the strengths they bring and where they’d like to grow.
Connection works both ways. People are getting to know us as we get to know them, and when we’re willing to share something of ourselves, it gives them something to relate to.
It’s natural to connect more easily with some people than others. Shared interests or similar personalities can help some relationships develop quickly, while others take longer.
Leader-member exchange theory, developed by George Graen and colleagues, describes how leaders form high-quality relationships with some team members and more limited ones with others. People in closer relationships often receive more information, trust, support, and a greater say in decisions, along with additional opportunities for growth and advancement. In contrast, everyone else’s connections are built around their roles and responsibilities.
Not everyone connects the same way. Age, personality, background, experience, neurotype, and communication preferences can all affect how comfortable people feel interacting with us. We can’t assume our own way of connecting will work for everyone. It's also easy to misread these differences. Someone who’s reserved can come off as uninterested, while someone who’s direct can come off as abrupt, even when neither is what they intend.
Which relationships on your team came easily? Which ones do you still have left to work on? How can you cross the line to meet them where they are?
“People do not experience your intentions; they experience your behavior.”
Every person on a team should be able to count on a few basics:
Belonging: People do their best work when they feel like part of the team. Leaders signal this in small ways, such as who gets invited into a discussion, whose name comes up when credit is given, and who hears about changes first.
Dignity and Respect: Everyone deserves the same basic respect, whether or not they’re easy to get along with. This shows up in our tone, in our follow-through, and in how we talk about people when they aren’t in the room.
Empathy and Patience: People want their experiences and feelings acknowledged, even when we can’t change the situation. Empathy means recognizing what someone is going through and saying so, and patience means staying engaged even if conversation takes longer than we’d like or a concern needs more than one discussion.
When McKinsey asked employees in 2021 why they had left their jobs, the answers they gave most often were relational: they didn’t feel valued by their manager or their organization. They also didn’t feel a sense of belonging, the same basic need we discussed above.
Employers, asked the same question, were more likely to point to pay and work-life balance. Leaders who assume people stay for the paycheck can overlook how much the relationship with their leader weighs in those decisions.
The stronger the bond, the easier it can be for people to be transparent with us. When people trust we’ll listen and treat them with respect, they’re more willing to bring us a concern or tell us when they see something differently.
Much of this comes down to how a leader responds to disagreements. If we get defensive, people learn to keep their concerns to themselves. If we take the concern seriously and talk it through, even when we still see it differently, people learn they can speak up, and this holds for everyone on the team, whatever their role or tenure.
Honest conversations can become harder to come by as leaders take on more responsibility. Research from Leadership Global on what it calls the leadership loneliness paradox finds that the higher leaders progress, the fewer people they can speak to openly. Relationships change, confidentiality limits what you can discuss, and the pressure to appear infallible makes it harder to ask for feedback or support.
The Quiet Teammate
Marcus leads a team of nine. Priya rarely speaks up in meetings, even though her work is consistently strong and always on time. Over a few weeks, Marcus decides she isn’t very invested in the team’s bigger projects. Based on that assumption, he gradually stops asking for her input.
During a project review, the team learns it will miss a client deadline because of an unflagged scheduling conflict. After the meeting, Priya tells Danielle, another team member, that she’d noticed the conflict two weeks earlier. When Danielle asks why she didn’t say anything, Priya says she didn’t think Marcus wanted to hear from her, and she wasn’t sure the concern would be taken seriously anyway. Danielle passes this along to Marcus later that day.
Marcus has a one-on-one with Priya on Thursday.
Ask Yourself:
What did Marcus assume about Priya’s silence, and what else might it have meant?
Danielle heard about the problem before Marcus did. What does this say about where Priya’s trust sits, and how should Marcus handle Danielle’s part in this?
What could Marcus say on Thursday that takes responsibility without putting Priya on the spot?
If Priya tells Marcus she’d rather keep her personal life private, how can he still build trust with her?
How could Marcus change the way he asks for input so good ideas don’t depend on someone speaking up in the moment?
“Connection gives us the grace and grit to unleash our potential and endure the challenge of our daily mess.”
When Someone Doesn’t Want to Open Up
Not everyone on a team wants a close relationship with their leader, and this isn’t always a problem to solve. Some people keep their work and personal lives separate on purpose. Researchers who study work-life boundaries, building on sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng’s work, describe people as falling along a range, from segmenters, who prefer a clear line between work and home, to integrators, who are comfortable letting the two overlap. In a study of 325 employees, Glen Kreiner found that how well a workplace matched someone’s preferred boundary affected their stress and the conflict they felt between work and home.
Trust doesn’t have to start with personal conversations, either. In a study of 194 managers and professionals, Daniel McAllister identified two kinds of workplace trust. Affect-based trust grows from care and concern between people, while cognition-based trust grows from reliability and a track record of following through. For someone who keeps to themselves, reliability is a natural place to start, and the more personal kind of trust can grow from there over time.
A few ways to connect with someone who keeps their distance:
Be consistent and follow through on what they bring to you, since trust in a leader often starts there.
Ask about their expertise or how they like to work, which builds a relationship without asking them to share more than they want.
Offer a low-pressure invitation now and then, and let them decide how close the relationship becomes.
If you notice someone pulling back, ask once, privately, in case something else is going on.
If their distance starts to affect the work, address it as a performance issue, since a reserved style on its own isn’t something to fix.
Marcus never meant to shut Priya out, and most leaders in his position don’t. The habits below help leaders get to know people deliberately, so problems like the one Priya spotted come up while there’s still time to fix them.
Here are some best practices for connected leadership:
Get to Know the Person: Learn something about the people you lead beyond their immediate responsibilities. Ask about their interests or experiences when the opportunity comes up, such as what’s most exciting to them right now, and follow their lead on how much they want to share. A photo or a favorite team’s mug in someone’s workspace can open a conversation just as easily.
Share Something of Yourself: Let people get to know you too. When it fits the conversation, share an experience or something about yourself without turning the focus back to you. Being open about the pressures and trade-offs you’re working through can help people see the person behind the role, as long as what you share stays relevant to them.
Listen Without Judgment: Give people time to explain what they think before deciding how you want to respond. When something isn’t clear, ask another question instead of assuming you know what they mean. Reflecting back what you heard and checking that you got it right helps people feel understood.
Understand Individual Strengths: Learn what people do particularly well and where they add value. Use what you know to help them grow and give them opportunities to use these strengths. Stretch assignments are a common way to do this, and research by Dan Cable of London Business School, across three studies, shows they’re most likely to help people develop when the leader stays responsive to their needs and concerns.
Meet People Where They Are: Pay attention to how different people interact. Some may need time to think before answering, while others work through an idea better by talking it out. Adjust your approach, whether that means sending a question ahead of a meeting or making time for a conversation in place of an email.
Check Your Assumptions: Be careful about deciding what someone’s behavior means before you have enough information. If someone seems disengaged or hard to connect with, take time to understand what may be behind it. Someone who speaks less may still have a lot to contribute, and someone who takes longer to build a relationship may still value it.
Broaden Your Circle: Think about who you know well and who you know very little about, and make an effort to build relationships outside your usual circle. A simple relationship map can help. List the people you lead and when you last had a meaningful conversation with each one. If the same names keep showing up with long gaps since your last real conversation, it’s worth asking whose perspectives you’ve been missing.
Every organization has a vision, and the people in it work toward it for different reasons. Some are looking to grow, while others care most about doing consistent, reliable work. When we know what drives each person, we can connect their work to where the organization is headed in a way that feels personal to them.
Strengthen your understanding of Connected Leadership by sticking with the following resources. Use this opportunity to note new insights and adhere to practices that will enhance your leadership journey.
Should You Set Clear Work-Home Boundaries?
The Leader-Member Exchange Theory - The Decision Lab
4 Ways to Engage Your Frontline Employees
The Leadership Loneliness Paradox: Why Connected Leaders Perform Better
