What Almost 400 Conversations on Leadership Taught Me
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Welcome the last(-ish) episode of Relationships At Work – The leadership podcast helping you build workplace connection, improve culture, and avoid blind spots. I’m Russel Lolacher, your host for almost 400 episodes.
I’m a communications and leadership nerd with a couple of decades of experience and a heap of curiosity on how we can make the workplace better.
Why I’m Pausing Relationships at Work
After almost 400 episodes, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what good leadership looks like, what gets in the way of it, and what leaders can do differently.
That perspective has come from my own experience, from hundreds of conversations with experts, and from hearing from listeners who were trying to lead better inside organizations that were not always showing them how.
And over time, my own point of view has become much clearer.
That’s really what is behind this pause.
I still care deeply about the emerging leaders this show was created for. But I’m increasingly interested in going deeper into leadership within a more specific environment — looking at how context, systems, pressures and the people being served change what leadership actually requires.
I’m not quite ready to share exactly what that looks like yet.
But I know I want to create something more focused, more specific and more useful for the people who need it.
So this pause isn’t about running out of things to say.
It’s about getting clearer about where I want to say them next.
And before I do that, I want to share some of the biggest lessons I’m taking with me from almost 400 conversations on leadership.
NINE LESSONS
When I think about almost 400 conversations on leadership, I think about the amazing guests and what they’ve learned to share with us. But the biggest value isn’t the number of ideas I’ve heard. It’s not volume.
It’s what those conversations have helped me sharpen. Clarify.
Some of my thinking was reinforced. Some of it was challenged. And some of it changed.
Over time, I started to see patterns — in what good leadership requires, where leaders get it wrong, and what organizations need from them.
So these aren’t nine things every guest agreed on. Or that I agreed with them on.
They’re nine conclusions I keep coming back to:
1. Clarity starts with shared meaning
We use words like leadership, transparency, accountability, trust and empowerment as if they mean the same thing to everyone.
They don’t.
And when leaders assume shared understanding that isn’t actually there, confusion gets mistaken for alignment.
Clarity starts by making sure we are actually talking about the same thing. We need to define our environment.
If I say I value transparency, what does that mean in practice? If I say I want accountability, what does that look like? If I say I want people to lead, what am I actually asking them to do? Transparency, accountability, leadership…How I define them might not be the same for my team or my organization.
Transparency is a great one. As a leadership, I could say I’m being transparent because I told my team A, B, and C about an organizational change. While my team thinks I’m holding back or being deceptive because I didn’t mention E, F, and G. Our definition of transparency isn’t the same and it’s hurting the culture and the relationship if we don’t get clear on that.
Shared language matters because shared language creates shared expectations.
2. Leadership and management are different — and organizations suffer when we confuse them
This is about clarity and could fall under definitions but it’s enough of an issue it needs its own lesson.
We still confuse leadership and management far too often. Both are important, but we are damaging our organizations by saying they are the same.
Management is essential. We need people who can organize work, manage resources, deliver results and keep things moving.
But doing those things well doesn’t automatically mean someone knows how to lead people.
And yet we continue to promote strong performers into leadership roles, give them responsibility for people, and assume they’ll figure the rest out.
Then we reward the output without always paying enough attention to how that output was achieved.
We need to respect the destination AND the journey. If a project is delivered but the team is burnt out or an entirely different team because everyone left, is that leadership? It is for some organizations. Because the finish line was crossed. But how much damage was done?
Leadership requires a different set of muscles, and organizations need to get much more intentional about developing and rewarding them.
3. Relationships are organizational infrastructure
I started this show believing relationships mattered at work.
I believe that much more strongly now.
Relationships aren’t a nice addition to the work. They are part of the infrastructure that allows the work to happen.
They affect whether people share information, raise concerns, get really honest, challenge bad ideas, collaborate and trust one another when things get difficult.
You can have a great strategy, a strong process and talented people, but if the relationships around the work are weak, everything gets harder. Or at least not nearly as effective.
Relationships are not separate from performance.
They help make performance possible.
4. Intention has to be bookended by impact
Leaders spend a lot of time explaining what they meant.
I meant to be transparent.
I meant to empower the team.
I meant to create a safe space.
I meant to support people through the change.
We create documents to show what we mean. We do it all the time.
Intent matters. It tells us what we were trying to do.
But leadership cannot stop there.
We also have to be willing to ask what people actually experienced.
Did they feel informed?
Did they feel empowered?
Did they feel safe enough to disagree?
Did the change actually feel supported?
Communication is a great example. Real communication isn’t just what is said, it’s what is understood. It’s meant to be 2-way. But we far too often just focus on the former and call it a day. That’s talking at, not with. So we intended to communicate but ignore the impact (good or bad)
The gap between intention and impact is where a lot of leadership blind spots live.
Good leadership means being curious enough to understand that gap and accountable enough to do something about it.
Intent should start the conversation.
Impact has to finish it. And maybe start another one.
5. Curiosity protects leaders from their own certainty
Speaking of curiosity. This is an essential ingredient to great leadership. It’s the antidote to assumption.
For example, in a lot of organizations, the more senior a leader becomes, the easier it can be to become further removed from the experience of the people affected by their decisions.
At the same time, they often gain more authority to make those decisions.
That combination should make curiosity more important, not less.
In all areas, we need to ask more questions. Be curious.
Seek perspectives you don’t already have.
Find out what is happening beyond the reports and dashboards.
And be willing to question your own assumptions.
Curiosity is not about being indecisive.
It is one of the ways leaders protect themselves from becoming too certain about a reality they may no longer fully see or understand.
Be curious.
6. Trust is built before you need it — and spent when you do
Trust is one of those things leaders often become very interested in once something has gone wrong.
During a crisis.
During major change.
During uncertainty.
But that is the worst possible time to start talking about it, caring about it and building it.
Trust is accumulated in ordinary moments. The everyday.
Do you follow through?
Do you communicate when you don’t have all the answers?
Do people hear from you when things are going well, or only when you need something?
Do your actions match what you say matters?
Do you provide a consistent, reliable, and safe environment to interact every day in?
Those moments create a reservoir of trust.
And when leadership becomes challenging and difficult, that trust is what you are drawing from. The benefit of the doubt. The understanding. The patience. That all comes from already established trust.
7. Culture is what people learn is acceptable
Organizations tell people what their culture is through values, mission statements and leadership messaging.
But teams learn the real culture by watching what happens.
What behaviour gets tolerated?
Who gets rewarded?
What happens when someone violates the values but still delivers results?
What happens when somebody raises a concern?
What gets challenged, and what quietly gets allowed to continue?
Culture is not simply what an organization says it believes.
It is what people learn they can expect.
I’ve heard of leaders who talk about the culture they want, but don’t acknowledge or respect the culture they have.
People have already learned what is acceptable and not.
And leaders are constantly teaching that lesson through what they reinforce, challenge and tolerate.
8. Leadership is an ecosystem
One of the things I think organizations get wrong is treating leadership as if it begins and ends with the individual leader.
It doesn’t.
Leadership is shaped by the ecosystem around that person.
Who hired them?
What behaviours were rewarded before they were promoted?
What kind of onboarding did they receive?
Were they ever actually taught how to lead?
What support, feedback and accountability exist once they are in the role?
And when poor leadership continues, who is responsible for creating the conditions that allowed it to continue?
The same is true across the employee journey.
Retention does not begin when someone starts thinking about leaving.
It starts with recruitment, onboarding, development, relationships, recognition, opportunity and the experience people have every day — right through to how they exit.
We far too often silo leaders without understanding how they got to be the way they are? Or we silo onboarding and wonder why employees are bothered that the organization didn’t fulfill the promises it made at the beginning.
If we want better leadership, we have to stop treating individual leaders and experiences as isolated successes or failures and start looking at the systems that create, support and sustain them.
9. Leadership is stewardship
The more I’ve thought about leadership, the more I’ve come back to stewardship.
Leadership is temporary.
You are given responsibility for people, teams, systems, relationships and sometimes entire organizations for a period of time.
They are not yours.
The question is what you do with that responsibility while you have it.
Did you leave the people around you more capable?
Did you strengthen the relationships?
Did you improve the system?
Did you build something that can continue without you?
Did you leave the next leader something stronger than what you inherited?
For me, leadership is increasingly about leaving things healthier than you found them.
Not just delivering results while you happen to be in the chair.
1,2,3,… yep that’s nine. I hope they landed. And if you’re a long time listener of the show, you know these aren’t surprising but they are important.
THE LIBRARY
While I’m taking this pause, I’m also going to spend some time going back through the Relationships at Work library.
Not just to keep the feed active, and not because I’ve run out of things to say.
There are conversations in almost 400 episodes that are timeless and incredibly relevant, and many of them deserve another listen.
I’m going to be selecting some of those episodes and bringing them back — conversations that helped shape how I think about leadership, that challenged assumptions, or that still feel particularly useful today.
I actually like the idea of using this pause to look back before moving forward.
There is a lot of value in that archive. And I want to make sure some of the best ideas in it don’t disappear simply because there is always another new episode.
NEXT SHOW
So what happens after the archive?
I have a pretty good sense of where I want to go next, but as I’ve said, I’m not ready to define it yet.
I’d rather take the time to get the focus right than rush into a new title, format or promise before I’m ready.
What I do know is that I’m not finished exploring leadership.
I’m just getting much more specific about where I want to take the conversation next.
GRATITUDE
And finally, thank you.
To every guest who gave me their time, their ideas, their stories and, in many cases, their vulnerability — thank you.
You helped make this show far richer than I could have made it on my own.
To everyone who listened, shared an episode, sent me a message, challenged something I said, or told me that a conversation helped you think differently about how you lead — thank you as well.
A huge thanks to those early fans who helped shape the show:
· Ian Foss,
· Richard Haliburton
· Ian Foss
· Esther Lee
· Jason Kolt
· Liz Reading
And all the love to those early guests who didn’t know what they were getting into but were supportive in the message I was trying to share:
– Kate Nasser
– Leslie O’Flahavan
– Vernon Ross
– Stan Phelps
– Vernon Ross
– Annette Franz
The community for me has always meant more than download numbers ever could.
Relationships at Work started as an idea about helping people build better relationships at work.
Almost 400 conversations later, I think it became something bigger for me.
It became a way to explore what leadership asks of us, what organizations get wrong, and what better might actually look like.
I’m proud of that.
And while I’m taking a pause from creating new episodes, I hope you’ll stay with me as I revisit some of the conversations that helped shape this show — and shape our thinking for me as the host and as listeners.
Thank you for being part of it.