Something isn’t adding up.
Leaders have better tools, more data, and more access to learning than at any point in history. And yet the challenge that keeps surfacing is the same one it’s always been, just harder to solve: connecting leaders across the boundaries and pressures that define modern organizational life.
If you’re responsible for how leaders develop in your organization, you already know connection at work matters. The harder questions are practical ones: How do you build it, where do you start, and how do you make the case internally when budgets are tight and portfolios are crowded? And why is connection in the workplace getting harder to build, despite investment?
This report on connection at work helps move you from diagnosis to action. Drawing on decades of research, data from thousands of leaders, and our experience working with global organizations navigating these conditions right now, it moves from diagnosis to a specific approach for building the human connections that make leadership work at scale.
The Infrastructure for Connection in the Workplace
Leadership is a social process that happens between people. It 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.
This is what we mean by relational infrastructure: The human foundation that makes leadership possible.
For most of organizational history, this infrastructure for connection in the workplace developed largely on its own. Proximity built trust. Shared physical space created the unscripted interactions where people learned how to read each other, disagree productively, and commit to a direction together. Organizational stability gave those relationships time to deepen: People stayed in roles long enough for trust to accumulate and informal networks to form. Connection and the informal understanding that holds organizations together developed from simply working alongside one another, over time.
That’s no longer the case. And many organizations haven’t fully reckoned with what that means for how they develop leaders.
Social connection at work has become harder to build and sustain. The conditions that once allowed it to form naturally have been replaced by an environment that actively work against it:
- AI-mediated communication that optimizes for speed at the expense of depth,
- Hybrid and distributed work that removes the informal exchanges that once built trust,
- Global expansion that creates the appearance of a unified organization, without the relational foundation to hold it together, and
- Continuous urgency that crowds out the repeated interactions that connection requires.
The result is organizations that look connected on paper but feel increasingly fragmented in practice. Leaders who are well-resourced but poorly calibrated. Teams that communicate without connecting. Cultures that share values statements but not frames of reference.
What the Data Shows About Connection at Work for Leaders
The cost of this disconnect is measurable. Only 20% of employees globally are engaged at work, according to Gallup, a figure that signals not only individual dissatisfaction but also a collective failure of the relational conditions that make engagement possible.
Manager engagement has dropped to 22%, and 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager. When the people most responsible for building connection in the workplace are among the most disconnected, the organizational consequences compound quickly.
And 69% of leaders now spend more than half their time influencing others without direct authority, according to the American Management Association — a reality that makes the quality of relationships not just important, but essential to how leadership functions at all.
These are symptoms of relational infrastructure problems. And they’re addressable through leadership development.
6 Challenges That Signal a Connection Gap
Our report identifies 6 organizational challenges that emerge when social connection at work isn’t strong. Most will feel immediately recognizable:
- The calibration gap in sensemaking: Leaders become well-informed but poorly calibrated, making decisions based on what the system reports rather than what’s happening.
- The friction in problem-solving: Decisions get made in the room and challenged elsewhere. The meeting ends with alignment. Two days later, everyone is back to square one.
- The fragility of transactional trust: Organizations accumulate transactional trust while the psychological safety that makes genuine commitment possible erodes — holding under normal circumstances and collapsing when the organization needs to pivot.
- The filtering effect of formal channels: When leaders lack the relational context to interpret what they’re hearing, they rely on the version of reality that makes it through official channels: optimistic, delayed, and stripped of nuance.
- The resilience gap: High-functioning relationships are the buffer that allows organizations to absorb disruption. When those relationships are thin, the damage from any setback runs deeper and lasts longer than it should.
- The thinning of workplace belonging: When belonging uncertainty takes hold, people hold back. They contribute less, hedge more, and spend energy monitoring signals rather than bringing everything they have to the work.
Watch the Webinar
As automation accelerates, human qualities matter even more. Yet many organizations are seeing the opposite: more efficiency, less human connection. In this webinar, we explore why the breakdown in connection is a structural leadership problem, and what development looks like when it’s built to close it.
How Leadership Development Builds Relational Infrastructure
Well-designed leadership development is where relational infrastructure gets created, building social connection at work. It’s a strategic investment, one that changes how leaders show up, how teams perform, and how organizations hold together amid perpetual disruption and uncertainty.
These 3 pathways make it possible.
The first is developing the relational capabilities that determine whether leaders can function as a collective. This includes listening that makes people feel genuinely heard, effective feedback that builds relationships, the ability to build alignment through influence, and the skill of spanning boundaries. Each one is learnable, and together they determine how leadership happens between people, not just within them.
The second is scaling a common leadership language. Much of what slows organizations down is leaders who haven’t found a shared way to work — who must decode one another’s intent before they can collaborate, translating between different assumptions such as how feedback works, how conflict gets addressed, and what direction-setting looks like. Shared leadership frameworks reduce that friction and create connection at work. They let leaders anywhere in the organization move directly to the important conversations, without the interpretive overhead that creates relational wear.
The third is the leadership development experience itself, designed to build connection in the workplace as a core outcome. When leaders learn alongside each other — surfacing real challenges, experiencing genuine peer support, tested together in conditions that mirror real organizational pressure — they leave with new skills and with the kind of relationships that rarely form in ordinary organizational life. Across more than 70,000 global leaders in our programs, 96% report making meaningful connections with their peers. The connection they experience in development becomes the model for the connection they create when they return.
4 Ways To Make Connection at Work a Leadership Development Priority
Understanding the problem isn’t the same as knowing where to start. We offer 4 specific moves for building relational infrastructure and fostering more social connection at work:
- Examine your leadership development portfolio through a relational lens: not just what it teaches, but what it builds between the leaders who go through it.
- Design connection in the workplace deliberately into leadership transitions, where relational infrastructure is most fragile and consequential.
- Invest in the capabilities that technology can’t replace: the human skills that become more valuable as AI absorbs more of the analytical work of leadership.
- Ensure senior leaders are modeling the connected, collaborative behaviors the culture requires, because connected leaders at the top set the standard for everyone below them.
These moves don’t require a portfolio overhaul. They require a different lens, one that asks not just what leaders are learning, but what conditions are being built for how they lead together.
Inside: a research-grounded framework for strengthening connection at work for leaders at every level of your organization.
