IT'S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS: What Great Leadership Looks Like

If you manage people, your job is people. It’s not just about processes or deliverables—it’s about how humans work together in the messy, beautiful reality of the workplace. Leadership is about relationships: with yourself, your team, and the behaviors you model and coach every single day.

At Applegate Talent Strategies, everything we teach is grounded in the Mutual Learning Approach—a mindset rooted in transparency, curiosity, accountability, compassion, and informed choice. It’s a powerful antidote to top-down, “fix them” leadership thinking. Mutual Learning starts with the belief that we are all part of the system we want to change.

And that means: If you're in a leadership role, it's your responsibility to model and coach the behaviors you want to see in your people.

What Does That Mean In Practice?

• Modeling isn’t about perfection—it’s about consistency and alignment. You can’t expect accountability from your team if you’re avoiding hard conversations. You can’t expect initiative if you're hoarding decisions. To model means two things:

  1. Be a role model. Don’t expect anything of others that you don't expect of or aren’t practicing yourself.

  2. Recognize: it’s not those people over there who need to change—it’s you, too. It's all of us.

• Coaching is about creating the conditions for people to thrive. That means:

  • Clear expectations

  • Meaningful accountability

  • A foundation of trust

  • The space to grow and contribute

Great coaching isn’t a tool you pull out when someone’s underperforming—it’s how you lead every day.

Relationships Show Up in Real Places

Colleagues at work in an impromtu meeting

When we speak of relationships at work, we’re not talking about office besties or romantic pairings. We’re talking about how people relate to one another in everyday, ordinary moments at work, such as meetings, decisions, disagreements, and feedback. These interactions are the job. And we're talking about all the mundane places where you interact with people: in the hallway, at the water cooler, in the pause before you reply. As a leader, you get to decide. Will you treat those moments as distractions—or as your greatest opportunity to shape how your team works together?

“Stinky Meetings” → Relationships in Practice

Meetings aren’t just about agendas—they’re where your culture plays out in real time. When people talk over each other, stay silent when they disagree, or nod in agreement and then undermine the decision later—those aren’t meeting problems. Those are relationship problems.

When you improve meetings, you’re not just streamlining logistics. You’re:

• Building psychological safety

• Practicing mutual accountability

• Reinforcing clear communication

• Modeling shared commitment

That’s not a calendar invite fix—it’s relational repair.

Coaching Conversations → One-on-One Relationship Building

Coaching is where trust deepens and performance grows. Great leaders use coaching to strengthen a person’s relationship to:

• Themselves (via self-awareness and reflection)

• Their goals (via clarity and alignment)

• Their team (via communication and accountability)

It’s not about fixing someone. It’s about helping them think and act with more intention. And it's about supporting them as they solve their own problems. All relational, all the way down.

Leadership Development → Culture of Relationship

Workshops, trainings, and development sessions are about more than learning tools. When done well, they become the foundation for your culture (i.e., "the way we do things around here"):

• This is how we give and receive feedback around here

• This is how we make and keep decisions around here

• This is how we surface hard truths without blame around here

This isn’t about “soft skills.” This is the bedrock of a healthy, high-performing culture. One where people know how to work with each other—even when it’s hard.

Final Thought

Leadership isn’t a title. It’s a practice. And leadership done well means recognizing that your job isn’t just to deliver results—it’s to create the relational conditions in which people can deliver those results together.

That’s the work. That’s the heart. That’s what makes it worth doing.

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Andrea Applegate is a leadership consultant, coach, and facilitator who helps people leaders model and coach the behaviors they want to see in their teams. Her work is rooted in the Mutual Learning Approach, where clarity, trust, and accountability aren’t abstract values—they’re daily practices.

👉 Curious what this could look like for your team? Explore the Great Leaders | Great Bosses™ Series or schedule a conversation.