Despite decades of leadership research, organisations still struggle with low engagement, distrust, and lack of alignment.
Why? Because we focus on developing individual leaders rather than cultivating strong relationships within teams.
This is the equivalent of learning techniques without understanding the underlying principles and foundations. Footwork!
You may want to stop trying to fix the people and instead fix the environment around them, the parts that connect us to each other.
What If We Stopped Teaching Leadership and Started Teaching More Proactive Relationships that Explore, Align, Support and Empower?
That where The EASE Framework™ comes in a proprietary model developed by James Hardie to support the creation of psychologically safe, empowered, and strategically aligned teams.
Explore and discover what’s really happening beneath the surface. “What assumptions are we making? What are we not talking about?”
Align and create shared clarity on purpose, priorities, and people. “Where are we stepping on each other’s toes-or leaving gaps?”
Support and build systems and behaviours that foster psychological safety, trust and learning. “Do we feel safe to ask for help, challenge ideas, or admit mistakes?”
Empower and enable individuals to take initiative and grow. “What decisions could I make without permission? What’s one thing I’ll try this week?”
🔹 Leadership training often emphasises competencies, decision-making, strategic vision, public speaking and while these do matter they are merely techniques
Imagine a boxer punching a bag and making little impact, the footwork makes the difference to the power of the punch adding rotational power of mass and velocity, and increasing momentum by using the whole body. This is foundational and fundamental, but novice boxers focus on hands and arms, and these do not have enough impact.
🔹 What truly drives influence is connection, trust, reciprocity, shared purpose.
Imagine a perfectly positioned fighter where footwork finishes fights because the foundations of position and power generation are resolved
Organisations invest billions in leadership development, yet Gallup consistently finds that only 21% of employees strongly agree that they trust their organisation’s leadership.
What if the issue isn’t ineffective leadership, but rather a failure to nurture strong, trust-based relationships?
Psychological safety is absent
Get the foundations right to build trust on.
Mind, Body, and Spirit: A Relational Model for Influence
If we accept that leadership is better understood as relationship, then how should we cultivate it?
Instead of training leaders, we should focus on building alignment within groups, across three key (Aristotelian) dimensions:
1️⃣ Mind (Cognitive Alignment):
- Shared understanding of goals, values, and purpose
- Psychological safety for open communication
- Intellectual curiosity and continuous learning outlook
2️⃣ Body (Action Alignment):
- Coordinated action and trust in execution
- Mutual accountability and reliability
- Recognition of stress, fatigue, and burnout
3️⃣ Spirit (Purpose Alignment):
- A sense of meaning and intrinsic motivation
- Deep interpersonal connection and shared energy
- Commitment to a greater mission beyond individual roles
When mind, body, and spirit are aligned in relationships, influence and trust emerge naturally, without needing a “leader” coercively or otherwise, to impose them from above. Instead enabling and empowering leadership proactively.
Our mind, body and spirit are fully connected and through our relationships so are we all networked to each other, a nexus of relationships, communication and understanding. The degrees of separation may not be as fas as we sometimes try to make them. Like a vector database in an AI the proximity through other relationships may be surprisingly close.
If you look at the night sky it is entirely possible that in the 2-Dimension version of the galaxy we can see will place stars close to each other that are in fact the furthest apart in 3-Dimension. Our relationships can be multi dimensional and yet may be viewed in only one of them.
Imagine two great friends working for competing companies, and then with a merger their relationship is changed.
What If We Stopped Teaching Leadership and Started Teaching More Proactive Relationships?
Instead of asking, “How can I be a better leader?” what if we asked:
- “How can I strengthen the relationships around me?”
- “How can I help others feel seen, heard, and valued?”
- “How can I align people with a shared purpose through trust, not authority?”
The best “leaders” aren’t obsessed with leadership.
They are obsessed with relationships, because that is where true influence lives.
Final Thought: The “Invisible Leadership” Effect
Think about the most inspiring person you’ve worked with.
Was it their title that made them impactful?
Or was it the way they listened, connected, and built trust?
At its best, leadership should be invisible, not a thing you do to people, but a force that emerges between people.
Maybe the world doesn’t need more leaders.
Maybe it just needs better relationships and then we can all contribute our leadership capacity.
Let’s Discuss:
- Can leadership exist without relationships?
- Do you want to lead with ease?
- Should we stop focusing on individual leadership development and instead train for relational intelligence?
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