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You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour. Hi, and welcome to Making Sense of Work. If you think back to the best boss you had, or the best working or team experience, I'm guessing there's a good chance that it was who you worked with that created that good experience. I imagine that your boss, along with being really focused on the business, on getting things done, was also a person who knew how to take people with them, who was also people focused. They were someone, maybe still are someone, who's considered and considers that people are a key part of getting a job done.

Speaker 1: 0:50

I was recently asked to speak about relational leadership to a group of HR directors. I knew that coming into the room, they didn't need me to convince them about it. They were already convinced about people-centered leadership. They or we might call it human-centered or even servant leadership. But I also knew that in our organizations, all too often we are experiencing leadership that is so focused on the job at hand, on delivering on pressures, on keeping shareholders happy, that stopping to take care of people along the way seems increasingly hard and, sadly, increasingly rare, even my own organization. I'm someone who considers myself deeply relational. Under pressure I can become very task focused and I find myself pushing things through when I'm not considering the other person in a way that I really think is aligned with my values, and this, of course, includes treating myself like this. So today in the podcast, I want to share how I see relational leadership and why I think it's important and why I think all of us can engage in it. Whether or not we're a leader, we can all think about how to build good relationships at work and we can look at the reason behind this and why this really matters. The reason behind this and why this really matters. I'm going to share the core components and a few practical steps which I believe will help. I'm recording this in early 2025. Over the holiday period, I like I'm imagining many of you had conversations about AI and the impact and potential impact on our working lives. Alongside these conversations, people have also talked to me about how it's going to impact what work is like, and they are a bit fearful, in fact, and concerned about their jobs, about the jobs of their family and friends. So we are in a period of massive change, and it's partly because of this that I believe we need to be talking about relational leadership, not just about AI, because it's only in us being human together in this very technocentric world that we'll be able to navigate this well, that we'll be able to identify how we can work well together and how we can lead well through this time.

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I'm going back to the best leaders we've worked with. When I think about the best leaders I've worked with, I can see a consistent thread of behaviors, ways in which they were with me and with the people around them, and the first word that comes to mind is trust. I knew I could trust them to be honest with me. It didn't mean that I always wanted to hear what they had to say, but I knew that they would tell me and that if they knew things that they couldn't tell me, I trusted their motivation for this. They trusted me to do the job and to say when I needed help. They listened, they took time to ask me about my family, about myself. They knew what I was good at and areas I didn't perform so well in, and they didn't expect me to be perfect. We also had regular one-to-ones and in those one-to-one conversations we both contributed, with me bringing things that I needed help or guidance on and them sharing things that they needed me to do. We talked, sometimes not for long, but we talked and we listened to each other with curiosity.

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I think of one leader in particular I worked with in a number of roles in different healthcare organizations. I was there as a coach and he was a senior leader. He was, and is, a person who prioritizes relationships. Working alongside him, I witnessed how, in very high pressure settings, it was still possible to treat people with kindness and respect and because he did this 90% of the time. On the rare occasions he needed to be acutely task focused and tell people what to do. They didn't mind. They knew that tomorrow he would touch base with them and check in on how they are.

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He and I had a running conversation about whether the Gordon Ramsay style of leadership one that is considered shouting or demanding things to happen did that style ever have a role to play in leading others. I you may be unsurprised to hear said never. I don't believe this ever plays a part, but he said and held that there are moments when it is critical to be heard and to get things to happen in a big hurry. And whilst this shouldn't be the only style of leadership, very occasionally it's had its place. I still disagreed.

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And then one day we were working together in a hospital and we were having a meeting in his office. One of his team stuck their head around the door and said that the emergency department CT scanners were both down. One was down for repair and the other had just failed. He turned to me and said this is a Gordon Ramsay moment. He said imagine your grandmother has just arrived in the emergency department and urgently needs a CT scan for diagnosis. You don't want her waiting. And he walked out. I know him well enough to know that he wouldn't have actually shouted, but he would have insisted on action immediately. In that moment he wouldn't have asked people how they are, he would have focused only on the job at hand. And he can get away with it because people would still like and trust him, because they knew that tomorrow. He would head down to the department as soon as he arrived in the hospital and check how they were Were they okay? After the crisis.

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Relational leadership isn't about leaving behind the job at hand. It's not about ignoring business pressures or targets. It's not about not leading in a very task-focused way when there's a crisis. It's about supporting people to do the job well. It's about working together to identify how best to do the job. It's about creating a sense of team while delivering those targets.

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When I think about the worst leaders I've worked with, the opposite is true. There's been no concern for the individual, only meeting their leader's needs or the needs of the organization, sometimes bullying or simply ignoring people, letting people to get on with the job by themselves, without support. I've worked with two very difficult managers in the past. One just simply lied to me all the time, and so there was no trust, and that made it very, very difficult to work. The other was a direct bully, not so much of me, but others were bullied out of the organization in a most terrible way and there was no need for her to do this. But her view was that this was the only form of leadership in this setting. Was that this was the only form of leadership in this setting? The challenge for her was that, when she finally left, the person who followed her led in almost an opposite way. He led kindly and relationally and delivered higher organizational performance. Bullying wasn't necessary at all. There is, of course, something in between these two groups. This is where we simply become so busy that we forget to connect. We're not intentionally leading in a challenging way, but neither are we focusing enough on being relational, and this is the area that most of us, even those who are most relational, are capable of moving into. So what is relational leadership? What does it look like in practice? I think that, at its heart, it's about connecting with others.

Speaker 1: 9:39

About 12 years ago, I worked on a large patient safety program in hospitals in the UK and my role was to explore how leaders could create a safer environment for patients. As a part of this work, we worked alongside safety experts from other industries and they shared two examples, which, for me, symbolize just how important creating connection and relationships are. The first is in the airline industry, where safety is, of course, both paramount and has largely been hugely successful. We see from the research that when an air incident happens, when there's an emergency, it's the ability of the flight crew to communicate clearly with each other that has the biggest direct impact on their ability to resolve the situation. In the research, they saw that typically, airline pilots are very task-focused and logical people Now I am personally very grateful for this and they're also often introverted, and this meant that when they came together for a flight, they might not naturally build a connection. They might instead just get on with the job of preparing for the flight and flying the plane. As a result of this, cockpit resource management training was developed, along with other areas. What's included in this framework is training pilots in communication, teamwork and decision making. It teaches interpersonal skills and these focus on communication, on assertiveness and on leadership, and they've gone as far as building this into their processes.

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Before every flight, flight crews and cabin crew come together for a flight briefing and then they walk together to board the plane, and this being together part is a part of building the open communication and relationship building. I was once sitting at Changi Airport in Singapore and I could see all the cabin crew and the flight crew coming to the plane individually and I actually became a bit nervous because I knew the research about this and obviously something had happened because once they got to the gate, they actually all came together and did the briefing in front of us, in front of the passengers, for that flight, and it was great for me to see this in action because I'd heard about it so much and this was a very relational activity. There was a lot of connecting and chatting and talking as well as, obviously, preparing for the flight to come. The other place that's been impacted by this research is in operating theatres in hospitals. In a similar way, surgeons are thankfully and mostly task-focused and logical people. They may not naturally connect with the surgical team before they start an operation, and again, in healthcare, we know that when something goes wrong, communication is central to the team being able to work well together. In response to this and to other safety factors, the World Health Organization developed a surgical checklist that's now used in every hospital globally prior to surgery. It covers the important things like have we got the right patient? But it also covers the team checking that the team have introduced, themselves, connected and that they're ready to work together.

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I'm sharing these examples because sometimes I get pushback about relational leadership. People say to me yeah, it's nice, but we haven't got time, it's not critical. And yet I would argue that if, in these two safety critical industries, the building of relationships is baked into their processes and systems, of course we've got time to do it. It's mission critical. It's the thing that's going to help us work well together in order to deliver what we need to for the organization. I do also believe that we're in this time of huge change and shifts in technology, and it will be our ability to communicate well and to work well in teams that's going to help us to navigate these challenges. We, as humans, are built for connection, brené Brown says in her book Daring Greatly, connection is why we're here. We are hardwired to connect with others. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering. So, if this is true, relational leadership is critical, and let's look now at what it looks like in practice so we can be thinking about how can I lead relationally? How can I be a relational colleague?

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In recent years, the research on psychological safety in organizations has helped us to define it more clearly. One example is Google's Project Aristotle, which looked at success in teams. They looked at the most successful teams and what they found was that the most important factor was what then went on to be defined as psychological safety. Amy Edmondson has led the research on psychological safety, and she describes it like this Psychological safety is not about being nice. It's about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes and learning from each other. It's about creating a climate where people feel free to express relevant thoughts and feelings without fear of being penalized. She goes on to describe the core components of psychological safety, and these are trust and mutual respect, open communication and dialogue, seeing mistakes as learning opportunities, inclusion and belonging, and open sharing and vulnerability. This sounds to me a lot like relational leadership At its core we are building trust and relationship. Still, however, relational leadership can feel a bit hard to define in practice, so I want to have a go at sharing with you a few ways that I think that we can embody it, that we can bring it into how we are at work.

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At a very simple level, you can think about how you say hello to each other and to your team each day, especially if you're working remotely. Do you check in on people to see how they are? Who do you say hello to? Who might you not say hello to? How might you not say hello to? How can you just simply go and connect with people in that small way?

Speaker 1: 16:39

In coaching, we talk about the move from tell to ask, so taking the time to ask the other person what they think first. This can also help us move from I need to know to you might know. We start to assume that the other person we're with has good insights and knowledge and we pause before leaping into suggestions and advice and hold the idea that the other person will have some thinking, some wise thinking, on this too, so we can make that move from tell to ask. So in all of our conversations we consider how could we be using more of a coaching approach? We could be listening and being really curious, demonstrating empathy and helping a person solve a problem themselves In many ways.

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If you want to think about how to be relational at work, you can think about those core components of coaching. You can think about those core components of coaching. One other way of thinking about it is to think about this balance of task versus relationship, and this means am I simply focusing on the job to be done or am I checking in with people to see how they are? A relational leader, a relational colleague, will build relationships with people with direct reports, and then they will also coach those other people to do the same. They're curious about people in the organization. They're taking the time to do this. Another really key way of thinking about how to do this well is to focus on your own emotional intelligence. This might sound a bit strange. Emotional intelligence is about self-awareness, but it's also about how we relate to others, and so good relational leaders are curious about that. They're seeking feedback about how other people are experiencing them and they're looking for ways to grow and develop in that way. They're curious about what other people are seeing in them and in that process they're also curious about how relational they're being.

Speaker 1: 18:42

I've already mentioned one-to-one meetings and whether or not you're a leader, taking time one-on-one to talk to somebody, ask them how they are, ask what's happening in work and in life and seeing if there's a way that you can support them, can be very powerful. Again, it's very simple. It's just really checking in with people. For me, if you are a leader, really having regular one-to-ones is critical, because these are the spaces where a person knows that they have dedicated time. They know that they can talk about things that are going well, things that might be difficult. They can bring problems that they want your help to solve and they can talk about career growth, promotion possibilities, projects, assignments, so much, and building in one-to-ones, I think, is really key to this. We can also signal how relational we are in meetings, so in our meetings we can draw out contribution and discussion and dialogue.

Speaker 1: 19:46

Meetings are also an opportunity for us to really lead relationally. They're a place for us to draw out contribution, discussion, to think about dialogue. They can be more inclusive. We can be thinking about how we draw people in, how we help people share opinions, how we help people disagree with each other so that we can come to a better solution. And, of course, we can focus on listening and empathy and seeing if we can listen 80% of the time, and especially in meetings, because there are other people in the meeting who will be bringing such a valuable concepts and insights that we can listen to.

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Final few things that we can think about I think that, as relational leaders, we hold a growth mindset, both for ourselves and others. We believe that change and growth is possible, and so we want to create conditions for people to feel empowered, to act autonomously and to be learning. And we want to be thinking about the team. We want to be thinking about drawing people into the team, creating belonging in the team and seeking ways to help people maybe who don't feel so included and to bring them in, to help them feel more included in what's happening in the team. And, finally, we can take informal moments.

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One of the things I love about singapore after being in london is that lunch is still something people do often. They mostly don't take lunch at their desks. They go out for lunch. Lunch and coffee are moments where we can be relational. Even a 30 minute lunch with someone is a chance to get to know them. It's in those informal moments that we connect, that we build empathy, and this supports our ability to work together. Perhaps most importantly, regularly pause and ask I wonder how people are today, and ask I wonder how people are today. There's so much reward and fulfillment in having strong relationships at work and we can all think about how to do this. We can make this our focus for the next months, for this year, in thinking about how do we build stronger relationships and connection at work.

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If you're curious about what to do and you're looking for other ideas, we have a few other episodes of the podcast where you can listen to guests talking about this and they bring this to life. In episode 41, dr Maria Presentin talks about servant leadership. In episode 44, mairead McCormack talks directly about leading hospitals through COVID and how to lead relationally in very challenging times. In episode 66, helen Sanderson talks about compassionate leadership. I wish you fun and a lot of good relationship building in the coming months and hope that together we can all seek ways to create relational and inclusive workplaces. Thanks for joining this episode of Making Sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.