Center for Creative Leadership

Leaders of change and improvement don't typically fail because they lack technical skills. More often, they fail because they never built the relationships that make change possible, or didn't give those relationships enough attention during the change process. A new research-based report, "The Space Between People," by @CCLdotORG defines leadership as a social process: "[Leadership] lives in the trust formed through repeated interaction, the shared understanding that allows people to act without constant realignment and the informal networks through which leadership travels." The authors call this relational infrastructure: "the human foundation that makes leadership possible". For most of organisational history, relational infrastructure developed largely on its own. Proximity and stability built trust as a byproduct of working alongside one another. That condition has gone. AI-mediated communication ("the net effect is more communication but less connection"), hybrid working, global expansion and continuous urgency now actively work against connection forming. Many organisations haven't grasped the implications for leadership, change leadership or leadership development. The symptoms are playing out everywhere: staff survey "engagement scores" keep falling; leaders make decisions based on what the system reports rather than what's actually happening; agreements reached in the room unravel days later; trust that looked solid collapses under real pressure because it was built on role rather than relationship; leaders see only the polished, delayed version of events because they lack the close ties to fill in the gaps; setbacks hit harder and last longer without strong relationships to absorb the shock; and people who feel psychologically unsafe hold back, instead of contributing fully. What should we do? Connection is an interpersonal capacity. We can't build relational infrastructure by developing individual leaders in isolation, however capable they are. We have to build leadership development around the social architecture that makes leadership possible at scale. Four suggested ways to do this: 1) Examine leadership development activities through a relational lens, creating conditions for leaders to work together, not just perform better individually. 2) Design connection deliberately into leadership transitions, when relational infrastructure is most fragile. 3) Invest in the human capabilities AI can't replace: listening, trust-building and boundary-spanning become differentiators, not lower priorities. 4) As senior leaders, visibly model the connected behaviours we want from everyone else. My own reflection (amongst many): we've long assumed that building "shared purpose" or "shared aims" is enough to generate the relationships that change and improvement depend on. This research suggests otherwise. Connection has become something we must deliberately design for, not something we can rely on emerging. Access to the paper: ccl.org/articles/guides/conn….