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Leadership is founded upon relationships; they are how you work with people, how you engage and inspire your teams and organizations to work towards a vision for the future, and how you get those around you to take ownership of their contribution.
Leaders who rely on authority alone are rarely successful. The most effective leaders make things happen through influence: through the way they communicate with their team; how they make and communicate decisions; the conversations they have. It’s about getting things done by inspiring people to want to do them and want to do them well.
Yet what makes up any given relationship? Hundreds and thousands of interactions and shared moments over time. Around a core of longer, deeper conversations and more significant events, most of what makes up our relationships are short, apparently inconsequential interactions. These are not interactions into which we put a great deal of thought, planning or intention; they happen largely on autopilot.
These so-called micro-interactions matter far more than we realize; they drive the success and efficacy of our relationships in subtle yet profound ways. As such, they deserve our attention.
What are micro-interactions?
Micro-interactions are what we say—and don’t say. They are how we say things: the phrasing, tone, timing and energy. They are what we listen to and what we ignore, consciously or otherwise. They are the emails we respond to fast, and the ones we sit on or avoid. They are the interruptions and the silences. They are the questions we ask and how we ask them. They are the smiles, frowns, blank looks, flashes of irritation that pass across our faces. They are our habits and behaviors. They are the myriad decisions we make. Micro-interactions are the moments of connection we have with other humans that occur in their multitudes every single day.
All of our micro-interactions have consequences, sometimes significant, often unintended. Collectively they show what matters to us and what we don’t care about. They project a continuous message to the world about who we are: what sort of person, what sort of leader.
How do micro-interactions shape our relationships?
In relationships, each micro-interaction is like a stitch in the tapestry of that relationship, adding to its depth, colour and overall shape. Alone they may seem insignificant but added up over time the micro-interactions become the relationship.
Our relationships are not static; they are constantly shifting, evolving and changing over time through each micro-interaction. This means that our micro-interactions are never neutral: each one is contributing to one of three things happening within the relationship:
First, you are growing it, nourishing it. Your micro-interactions are additive, net positive, forward moving over time and are contributing to an ever deeper and higher-quality relationship.
If that isn’t happening, there are only two other things that may be happening.
One, you are actively killing it. Your micro-interactions are damaging the relationship, causing loss of trust and decrease in connection and understanding.
Or two, you are letting it die through neglect. Whether through carelessness, thoughtlessness, a lack of self-awareness, laziness or simply not paying enough attention, the relationship is deteriorating. Your micro-interactions are insufficient, inconsistent or confusing. Trust is eroding, and the metaphorical distance between you is increasing.
This is not about having to be perfect; progress in any relationship is not linear over time. But you do need to pay attention to the net impact of your micro-interactions, to look at the direction of travel. The work for you to do is, as far as possible, to eliminate or transform those micro-interactions which are at best frustrating to others and, at worst, cause harm, even when unintended.
What does that look like in practice?
A CEO I worked for earlier in my career illustrates this well. On good days, they would come into the office with a smile, say a cheery good morning to everyone, and sometimes stop for a chat with colleagues to check in or ask about their family or something they’d been up to. In meetings they would be calm and supportive. They would still challenge or coach where necessary but with an undertone of support; I knew they had our backs. They would be reasonable with requests, communicate clearly and be open to hear contrary points of view. You get the picture.
Then there were the bad days, which we all knew about from the moment they came in. No smiles, no good morning, simply striding through to their office and shutting the door, sometimes with a slam. We spent the day trying to stay under the radar, and not do anything that might cause their attention to land on us. They had a habit of sending an email then five minutes later appearing behind your desk, unannounced saying: “So what do you think?”. They would stand over you while you read the email, demanding an instant response all the while creating pressure that was unlikely to deliver your best thinking. Errors or ideas not fully thought through would be scorned, sometimes publicly, questions would be asked aggressively, and their mood affected the entire office.
It was not only the balance of the good and the bad days that impacted the relationship, but the unpredictability. Because for my own protection I had to act as if any day could be a bad day, or that any micro-interaction could turn bad. This eroded trust and made me hesitant to speak up, to the point where I would try almost anything to avoid having to risk interacting with them.
The behavior doesn’t need to be this extreme to still be harmful. Consider the leader who is consistently a few minutes late to every meeting, what message are they sending? That they don’t respect the time of those present? That they are too busy, or too disorganised to be there on time? That the meeting doesn’t really matter to them? In a way it doesn’t really matter what message is received by those present, the point is that the behavior does send a message. And it is unlikely to be a positive one, or have a positive impact on the relationship.
The influence of power
Power and authority, in other words your ability to reward or punish, add significance to every micro-interaction. The result is that your behavior has an even greater influence on your relationships than you realise: things which may feel innocuous or unimportant to you can have a disproportionate impact on others. Those around you look to you for cues: what you acknowledge, what you ignore or let pass; what and who you reward, and what you punish; what you listen to, what conversations you avoid or shut down. These give out subtle signals to those around you. They train people how to treat you and how they should behave. They shape the relationship.
As a leader, as someone who people look to for guidance, it’s even more important to consider exactly what messages your micro-interactions are sending. It is crucial to think, reflect and seek to understand the impact of your micro-interactions. You underestimate their power at your own peril.
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