From my research: The 'Professional Plus' Factor

How peripheral conversation, informality, and personal connection could be a key to positive, sustainable leadership networks

Note: In this newsletter edition, I indulge in some of my own recent research and reflect on what the findings may mean for managers and future leadership development approaches. If you’re not as into this kind of content, that’s cool: Next edition we’re back into the letters series. Remember, if you’d like me to respond to one of your own scenarios or questions through the letters series, you can submit a situation or query anonymously, here.

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“What we call ‘managing’ is often a way of trying to avoid the uncertainties of relationships. But leadership is about coming closer, not pulling away.”
-Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

Some background on my research area

As you may know, my current PhD research focuses on exploring distributed leadership in Australian health networks. Distributed leadership views leadership as a process that occurs between people and engages with their specific context. Leadership, through this lens, is a social influence process that is available to those both with and without formal titles; whenever you’re influencing others, you’re engaging in leadership, so you don’t have to be the manager to do so. And, the ‘distributed’ aspect considers that more than one person can practise leadership in a group; with multiple leaders stepping into leadership spaces at different times, depending on the context.

For my research, in a nutshell, there is a lot of rhetoric in the modern day about the value of this more collective, collaborative, and networked approach to leadership (as opposed to the individualistic, heroic and hierarchical models we’ve seen dominate in the past); but not as many empirically-supported ways of operationalising and measuring exactly what that looks like. I’m interested in understanding distributed leadership in greater depth, and my PhD is largely focused on creating a more granular model of the dimensions that comprise distributed leadership in intraorganisational and interorganisational networks. The hope is that on completion of my dissertation, I’ll have a bright and shiny new model of distributed leadership that can deepen our theoretical understanding of the phenomenon, and also bridge the gap between theory and practice by offering some more concrete aspects of how a strong distributed leadership model can play out on the ground. So far, so good — I’ll keep you updated.

But one of the aspects I’m particularly interested in is what we call the ‘affective’ dimension of distributed leadership. I define this as the discrete emotional states and affective experiences at the individual, dyadic and collective levels across a network, that interact with, emerge through, and constitute part of leadership processes. There has historically been little attention paid to the emotional side of distributed leadership, even though, just anecdotally, most of us would probably agree that emotions and human connections are integral parts of any leadership experience. So, as you can imagine, I’ve been quite keen to explore it.

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The affective dimension of distributed leadership

In my most recent study, I conducted a multiple case study of three Australian health networks. This involved 30 hour+ long interviews, and a whole lot of me sounding like a wannabe 90’s therapist (‘…and how do they make you feel?’ ‘…and how would you describe your relationship?’). A key part of these interviews involved asking people who they tend to turn to for advice and guidance, or bounce ideas around with — a good question to get a sense of the leadership practices taking place and to capture the leadership relationships that don’t necessarily occur between manager and employee. A lot of people, for example, get advice and troubleshoot strategies with key peers, people that used to work in their department but now work elsewhere in the organisation, people in different services or locations that have similar challenges to them but aren’t technically connected to their role at all, etc.

Once we identified some of the key leadership relationships for each person, we dove a little deeper into what was involved: people described their relationships, picked out the key emotions associated, and discussed why they went to those people in particular for advice or guidance.

Some of the findings that came out of this process shed great light on what good leadership relationships looked (and felt) like…

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Warm, playful, and ‘Professional Plus’ leadership relationships

Respondents talked a lot about their more influential one-to-one relationships having a strong sense of warmth about them: They saw their leaders as creating a warm, approachable and open space, as being supportive and fostering a strong sense of trust. They also discussed their key influence relationships as being fun and playful, with jokes and a shared sense of humour, a level of informality and personal connection, and feelings of friendship emerging as common sub-themes. People liked being able to have a laugh with their leaders, to feel open and vulnerable enough to ask the silly question, and to feel like they’re not just a work colleague; but a real, human connection.

A throughline across many of these descriptions of influential relationships, we found, was what we’re calling the ‘Professional Plus’ aspect. That is, the relationships maintain all the professional working qualities that you’d expect from a strong leader-member connection to support task achievement (credibility, knowledge, professionalism, etc.), but also have a ‘plus’ factor that adds a more human and connected element to the relationship. For some relationships, this was centred around engaging with amusement and humour on the periphery of constructive work conversations. For others, it was shared commonalities in life or professional experiences that nurtured a deeper connection. For others still, it was a personal connection that evolved into a friendship outside of work. The extension of these relationships beyond professional boundaries to a more informal or personal level was mentioned by many respondents in various forms. You didn’t have to be best buddies or even actual ‘friends’ in order to achieve this in a relationship; I remember one respondent talking about how she and the colleague she engages a lot for brainstorming purposes also send each other a lot of memes during work, for example. The main thing seemed to be more about the relationships feeling real, crossing the boundary from purely professional into ‘a little bit human’.

One conclusion we can make, it seems to me, is that maybe this ‘Professional Plus’ aspect acts as a supporting pillar to strengthen and sustain leadership relationships in a network; especially in the context of big, geographically and professionally diverse interorganisational networks, where a sense of familiarity and connection might help cut through some of the natural challenges that come with complexity and structural boundaries.

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Thanks so much for reading my newsletter! I hope you like the new format. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than the next person, so for me, it is more about reflecting and exploring a situation or concept together than offering any kind of concrete answers.

Would you like to submit a situation or question for the ‘Letters’ series? Have an aspect of the human experience you’d like to explore in more depth? Submit anonymously below.

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“In every interaction, we are either deepening connection or eroding it.”
— Brené Brown

Ideas for nurturing the ‘Professional Plus’ aspect

In a leadership training session I conducted for a corporate team last year, there was a lot of robust discussion about the difficulties of being an emerging leader, with a sense that in order to be a good one, you have to be respected as someone impartial, credible, and disconnected. To achieve that, some reasoned, you couldn’t have personal connections with people you were leading: it would undermine your credibility.

This is not an uncommon sentiment to come up in leadership development, and understandably so. It makes sense that emerging leaders might fear the vulnerability that comes with opening up to people, or worry about being seen as too human and being recognised as imperfect. It’s fair that one might be concerned about perceptions of impartiality if they develop strong friendships with one person over another; that it might prompt queries or even scepticism about their decision-making if some relationships are particularly strong.

And yet, on the contrary, this research is incredibly clear: Personal connections matter. To me, it is likely underpinned by a deeper concept that, at the end of it all, humans are relational beings that seek connection, and leadership is inherently intertwined with the fabric of our affective relational experiences. I think this is also an intuitive assertion. If I think about the leaders I’ve engaged with in the past that have had the biggest impact on me, they all felt more like well-rounded relationships with people who knew and understood me (and I them) on a personal level; not just people who gave me good advice and direction for achieving my goals at work.

Perhaps, if one is working on the Professional Plus aspect in their own leadership, it might involve actively getting to know people on a more personal level: taking time out in one-on-ones to slow down and connect over hobbies, backgrounds, family, or sports. It could mean strengthening our observation muscles to identify and pause when opportunities to engage in more informal relating emerge in conversation. For some, it could mean placing a renewed value on laughter and joking around at work, rather than always jumping to a task-oriented redirect. Letting people sit in the periphery for a little while, it seems, might cultivate stronger foundations for robust, long term leadership networks.

Maybe it means—and don’t hate me for this—that those icebreakers we all hate can actually serve a really wonderful purpose, if they genuinely operate as a platform for peripheral conversation unrelated to work. Starting a meeting with a question to everyone about their favourite part of the weekend, or what they like to eat for breakfast, could theoretically spark more informal and peripheral engagement. Embedding opportunities to get more personal with each other can accumulate over time. Overall, embracing and nurturing the moments to connect as humans, rather than seeing them as potentially worrisome demonstrations of partiality, could be a key to strengthening both our leadership practice and the broader networks in which we engage.

I’d love to know your experiences with the Professional Plus aspect (it’s all budding research, after all), and how you’ve nurtured this or experienced it with someone influential to you. You can leave a comment or reply to this email to let me know.

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Thanks so much for reading my newsletter! I hope you like the new format. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than the next person, so for me, it is more about reflecting and exploring a situation or concept together than offering any kind of concrete answers.

Would you like to submit a situation or question for the ‘Letters’ series? Have an aspect of the human experience you’d like to explore in more depth? Submit anonymously below.

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I mostly write about things I find interesting, and often my writing is a way of clarifying my own learnings and insights. Any views expressed in this newsletter are my own and are not affiliated with any other institution, entity or person. Also, these newsletters contain generalised ideas, and none of this material constitutes professional or specific advice of any kind.