Relational Intelligence at work
Most leaders get buy-in from their own team. Fewer are good at getting others on board.
Being able to mobilise people who don't report to you can often make the difference between success or failure in a role.
Post-pandemic, the work of leadership happens across functions, geographies and reporting lines. Between 57% and 84% of knowledge work done in large organisations is cross-functional. 30% of meetings span multiple time zones (Microsoft data). You are constantly dependent on people who don't share your priorities and don't answer to you. They also have plenty of other demands on their attention.
This is a problem that comes up constantly in my coaching work. How do I get buy-in from my peers? How do I influence senior leaders outside my area? How do I get Finance, HR or Legal to prioritise my project?
The people who need to help you deliver are rarely the ones who report to you.
This requires leaders to build trust across the organisation. But this is in short supply - down from 46% in 2022 to 29% this year, according to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast. Flatter, more international organisations are demanding more relational skill from leaders at exactly the moment that this skill is scarce.
And as AI replaces more tasks and roles, the ability to connect with people and bring them to action becomes more critical, not less. The leader's role is shifting — and human connection is becoming the defining capability.
The leaders who navigate this well focus on the other person first.
Stephen Covey had it right — seek first to understand, then to be understood.
What this looks like in practice
It means deliberately building stronger relationships . Not through charm or politics, but by understanding what the people around you actually want and connecting with them on that basis. Then you can apply that understanding to bring them with you.
This is Relational Intelligence, applied to organisations. It draws on behavioural science — including the psychology of motivation and Robert Cialdini's evidence-based work on influence — and it's a learnable skill. The framework has four steps.
1. Map Start with putting the key players on a matrix. Who do you actually need to deliver your priorities? For each person, ask two questions: how important are they to your work, and how strong is your current influence with them? You need to have influence with the people who matter most to your priorities.
2. Understand Before you approach anyone, build a rich picture of who they are. What drives them — not just professionally, but personally? What are they worried about? What does success look like for them? Then outline their experience and perspective of your shared work - what they are currently thinking, doing and feeling around this topic?
3. Connect Using what you’ve learned, meet them and ask better questions. Listen without preparing your next move. Demonstrate that you understand their world, or at least test the assumptions you’ve made in step 2. The focus here is to build the connection as a foundation.
4. Align Now apply what robust research tells us about how people actually change their behaviour. Two of Cialdini's principles are particularly powerful in an organisational context:
The majority of leadership development doesn’t focus on these skills
Technical skills, strategy and execution are usually covered in these programs. But the ability to read another person's motivations and build credibility without authority is usually picked up on the job, which is harder to do in a remote-first work environment.
This is the gap that Relational Intelligence can fill. The framework is grounded in research and refined through years of working with leaders navigating these challenges.
Try it out. And if you've developed your own approach to this problem, or want to share how you get on, let me know.