I recently finished guiding a cohort of amazing leaders through a semester of our Applied Agility In Leadership program. In our final weeks, I realized a recurring theme: the solution to so many of our leadership challenges lies in cultivating personal relationships. I might even call this the ‘secret sauce’ of effective leadership - and an ingredient which is often severely lacking. Reflect on your last few weeks at work: what percentage of your time was devoted to developing personal relationships with your team members, peers, and stakeholders?

Here are some tangible benefits of strong relationships.

1. Creating psychological safety. For people to feel safe to learn, to contribute, and to challenge, they need to have trust, and that trust stems from human relationships. Is psych safety really so important? Google identified psychological safety as the number one factor in team performance.

2. Increasing influence. The more people trust you, the more you are able to influence them.

3. Resolving conflicts. If I care about you deeply, then I will be motivated to resolve conflict constructively. If I don’t care about you, I’m likely to avoid the conflict, or to fight to win - to get my way.

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott says that in order to challenge someone directly, you must first demonstrate that you care deeply — with emphasis on the word deeply! And it requires a deliberate effort and an investment of time to demonstrate that level of care and build a strong bond of trust.

Some ways to cultivate relationships:

1. Prioritize a list of people to connect with. It could be long-term relationships that you’ve taken for granted lately, or people you’ve not yet spent enough time with.

2. Devote time to having personal conversations. Meet for coffee or lunch. If you’re remote, set aside meeting time to talk about non-work topics.

3. Start meetings with a simple icebreaker question or prompt.

4. Be curious. Ask people to tell you about their interests, their families, their challenges, their desires. Then shut up and listen.

Who do YOU need to (re)connect with?