New Leaders: Why Building Relationships with Your Team Matters

It can be challenging for new leaders to balance between being respected and approachable. However, building a relationship with your team members is crucial for their development and your success as a leader. In fact, bosses who develop relationships with their team members also help those team members to develop their own resiliency.

Relationships Create Psychological Safety

One of the most significant benefits of building a relationship with your team is the creation of a sense of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the belief that one can take risks and be vulnerable in front of others without fear of negative consequences. This creates an environment where team members feel free to try new ways of doing things, delight their customers, and share ideas without fear of retribution. Team members who feel safe are more likely to be engaged, and their engagement often translates into better performance.

A strong relationship with a boss is at the root of feeling secure and safe. When team members feel that their boss values them as individuals, they are more likely to be committed to their work and to the team’s goals. As a result, they are more likely to take ownership of their work and produce higher quality results.

According to a study in the International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, Authors Abraham Carmeli and Jody Hoffer Gittell found that leaders who develop high-quality relationships with team members can create a culture of psychological safety. These relationships were developed by providing support, empathy, and trust to the individuals, and such relationships can lead to increased learning from previous failures, therefore improving performance.

new leaders should build teams with psychological safety to enhance performance and impact

Examples From Business: Google and Southwest Airlines

To further illustrate this point, let’s examine a couple of examples from the business world. First, let’s consider Google, a company that consistently ranks as a “best places to work.” Google has long been known for its emphasis on employee relationships and psychological safety. By providing a culture where employees feel psychologically safe and supported, Google creates an environment that fosters creativity and innovation.

Another example is Southwest Airlines, which despite some recent setbacks, is consistently ranked as one of the best-performing airlines in the United States. Southwest’s employees are known for their positive attitude and excellent customer service – allowing their unique personalities to shine through without punishment or reprisal. Southwest places a significant emphasis on employee development, which includes how to create exceptional relationships among team members and leaders. By valuing their employees and creating a culture of empowerment, Southwest’s employees are motivated to provide exceptional customer service.

Example From the World of Sports: Coach Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson is known as a leader who developed strong relationships with his team members, which he did as the former head coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

During his tenure with both teams, Jackson was known for building strong relationships with his players and became known by the nickname “Zen Master”. He emphasized open communication, harmony, mutual respect, and trust as the foundation of his coaching style. He believed that by developing relationships, he could create a culture where players felt comfortable taking risks and trying new things on the court. This relationship-based approach paid off in a big way for Jackson and his teams.

Phil Jackson – Michael Jordan

Phil Jackson led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships in the 1990s, and the Los Angeles Lakers to five championships in the 2000s. Many of his players, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal, credit Coach Jackson with helping them develop their skills, both on and off the court.

For example, during the 1997-1998 season, Jordan was dealing with personal issues and had lost his father earlier in the year. Jackson knew that Jordan was struggling and took the time to offer his support. Jordan later said that this conversation helped him get through one of the toughest times in his life. Jordan shared that he felt that Jackson genuinely cared about him as a person, not just as a player.

Phil Jackson’s style was on full display in the documentary, “The Last Dance” when discussing his final season coaching the Chicago Bulls. Knowing that he was going to be terminated at the end of the season and the team would be broken up, he used that to further strengthen the bond among the players. He became even more trusted, especially managing the strong personalities on the team, including Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen, and Dennis Rodman.

Phil Jackson – Kobe Bryant

Similarly, when Kobe Bryant was a young player with the Lakers, he had a reputation for being both difficult to coach and a selfish player. Coach Jackson took the time to build a relationship with Bryant, getting to know him on a personal level and helping him develop his leadership skills. Bryant later said that he felt that his relationship with Jackson was more than just a coach–he was a mentor and a friend.

These examples show how a leader who takes the time to build relationships with their team can help those team members develop their resiliency, a key characteristic of effective teams. By creating a culture of psychological safety, team members are more likely to take risks, try new things, and perform at their best without fear. As a new leader, taking the time to build these relationships can be one of the most effective ways to build trust, laying the foundation for a strong and successful team.

A Lesson for New Leaders

As a new leader, it’s essential to prioritize building individual relationships with your team members. By creating a culture of psychological safety, you’ll foster an environment where team members can take risks, try new things, and produce their best work. As demonstrated by Google, Southwest Airlines, and Phil Jackson, developing strong relationships with team members can have a significant, positive impact on driving for results. As you start your leadership journey, remember that your team’s success is your success, and investing in your team is always a wise choice.

Key Takeaways

New leaders who develop strong relationships with their team members can help those team members develop resiliency, which can lead to increased performance and success. Building a relationship with a boss creates psychological safety and a feeling of security, allowing team members to take risks, try new things, and delight customers.

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Book Review: Trillion Dollar Coach

Google alumni Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle wrote Trillion Dollar Coach as a tribute to their late friend and coach, Bill Campbell. In the book, Campbell is memorialized as a larger than life personality, with a role in helping to shape leadership and business strategy for companies like Apple, Intuit, and Google.

Campbell, a former football player and coach for the football team at Columbia University, ended up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and became the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Apple. After his experience at apple, he went on to lead several companies, including Intuit. Later in life, Bill Campbell became a confidant and coach for some of Silicon Valley’s titans, such as Steve Jobs, Ben Horowitz, and Sheryl Sandberg.

TrillionDollarCoachThe book is filled with Campbell’s wisdom as a business veteran, successful leader, and a warm and principled person. To begin, the book shares an account of Campbell’s funeral, which was attended by a wide range of Bill’s friends including his regular golf caddie at his home in Mexico, as well as Silicon Valley’s most well-known tech leaders. Campbell was known for his hugs, treating everybody the same, and his community building opportunities, like the annual Super Bowl trip, which he endowed in his will.

Campbell had all the characteristics of a good coach: brutal honesty, wisdom, complete confidentiality, loyalty, and accessibility, to name just a few. He imparted lessons to already extremely successful people in values-based leadership, how to run an impactful meeting, putting the team first, and achieving organizational and product alignment.

To get access to more of Campbell’s rich wisdom, you are going to have to buy the book, which I recommend partly because of the lessons within it and partly because coaching is an often overlooked, but necessary quality, for the most successful leaders.

If you think about it, leaders of companies play the role of a coach. In many businesses, the front-line, customer-facing staff and product developers are not in management roles. Like a sports coach, who plays the game through the players, management is almost always in the role of working to deliver a product or service through the employees. Reading this book will help give leaders insight over how to coach employees towards success.

Coaching is also not just the role of the leaders, including the CEO, but also a resource that leaders, especially CEOs, should invest in for themselves. Campbell was an outside eye, an adviser, almost like an organizational doctor, who could diagnose problems and work through solutions with the CEO. Often, leadership at the top of an organization can be lonely and isolating. Having a coach can help the CEO improve and be exposed to things he may not otherwise see.

To understand this point in greater detail, I recommend you watch Atul Gawande’s 2017 TED Talk on coaching. Gawande, a world-class surgeon, learned a lot about improving his surgery technique when he hired a coach. He believes that coaching is essential to becoming great in any field.

If Steve Jobs needed a coach, all of us probably do as well. I am sure many readers of this book will feel as I do, that it would have been a rare privilege to get to meet Campbell before he passed away. May his memory continue to be for a blessing.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Coaching is a core competency for successful leaders. The right coach can help a leader achieve greatness by showing them dynamics in the organization that they may not otherwise see. A leader who coaches their team members can open up incredible potential in the entire organization.


Trillion Dollar Coach is being released today and is available for purchase on Amazon for $28.99 (does not include Prime discount).