Why leaders need to focus on relationship building now more than ever.

BY ROBIN CAMAROTE, EXECUTIVE COACH@ROBINCAMAROTE

For Inc.

Photo: Getty Images

Doing this one thing changed everything about how I lead.

I stopped thinking about leadership as a role with responsibilities and started treating it as a relationship.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “You don’t need a title to be a leader.” And that’s true, but we still too often think of leadership as a position that comes with power, authority, and control.

However, at its core, leadership is about building and sustaining relationships.

Your leadership success hinges on your ability to form strong relationships with your team  — both one-to-one with those closest to you and one-to-many if you’re leading a large organization.

And the thing about relationships is that they’re dynamic and built on mutual trust, respect, and understanding. At work, our relationships center on creating a shared vision and working together to achieve common goals.

Know the three universal needs of employees

To start, you must understand the needs and motivations of your team; the truth is that employees don’t want to show up just to take orders. They want to feel confident in their ability to execute their roles. They want to have a say in how they invest their time and energy, and they want to feel connected to those around them. These universal needs — competence, autonomy, and relatedness — are grounded in research by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci in their work on self-determination theory.

For me, one particularly difficult experience shook up how I’d thought about leadership up to that point. Nearly 15 years ago, half of my team quit in a coordinated walkout. The shock and hurt of that experience fundamentally changed how I viewed leadership and what was important to me in my career. Since then, I’ve devoted my professional development to figuring out the kind of leader I want to be. For me, the answer is a leader who views my position as a relationship — not a role.

Put building and sustaining relationships first

In a relationship, you know everyone is different and that people respond differently to different approaches. You take time to get to know each team member on a personal level, to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and what motivates them. And when the size of your team makes individualized attention impossible, you create a second team of like-minded people to cascade the importance of trust and respect for all.

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