Why relational leadership matters more than ever

Engagement is an outcome of relationships

I recently attended the National Multiple Disadvantage Summit hosted by Making Every Adult Matter (MEAM). I came away with pages of notes and one line I’ve been thinking about a lot since:

“Engagement is an outcome of relationships.”

It came up during a discussion on peer support and lived experience, but the same idea surfaced throughout the day in conversations about homelessness, public health, anti-racism and systems change.

Again and again, speakers returned to the challenge of building services that feel genuinely human and relational inside systems shaped by commissioning, accountability and measurable outcomes. These systems often struggle to recognise the experiences that can have the greatest impact on the people using them: a person asking for help for the first time, someone attending an appointment they’d previously avoided or someone beginning to trust again.

They can look small from the outside, but feel enormous for the person involved.

Why this matters for leadership

Listening to these conversations, I kept thinking about how closely they mirrored the leadership searches I run across the social justice space.

Strategy and operational experience still matter, but many organisations are also looking for leaders who can build trust, navigate complexity and create environments where people feel able to speak openly.

Several speakers also challenged more traditional ideas of authority. One noted that when leaders speak first, people tend to follow, which can close down the very conversations organisations most need to have, while another spoke about protecting dissent because of the role it plays in helping organisations question assumptions and avoid groupthink.

In social justice organisations, where decisions are often complex and resources are stretched, these dynamics can directly affect how effectively teams learn, challenge and respond to pressure.

Why relational leadership is harder to recruit for

This creates challenges for recruitment processes and for boards thinking carefully about the kind of leadership they actually want to bring into their organisations.

These qualities are often the hardest to assess through traditional recruitment and assessment methods. They don’t always present with the confidence or polish that boards and panels often associate with senior leadership.

Sometimes, the most relationally intelligent leader in the room is not the loudest voice in it.

Organisations increasingly need leaders who can build trust, navigate uncertainty and work effectively across complex relationships and environments. Finding them often requires looking beyond the most familiar signals of leadership potential.

For me, that starts long before a job description is written.

How recruitment processes shape what leadership gets recognised

The searches I find most rewarding begin with conversations about the organisation itself, its culture, its pressures and what kind of leadership it actually needs. That means understanding more than the role on paper. It means understanding the environment a leader will be walking into, where influence sits, where trust is strong or fragile and how the board and leadership team really work together.

That groundwork shapes everything that follows, from who we approach and how we frame the opportunity through to the questions we ask during assessment. It also affects whether candidates feel able to show us who they really are, rather than presenting the version of leadership they think a panel expects to see.

Assessing relational leadership isn’t straightforward and it rarely sits cleanly within a competency framework. But you will notice patterns in conversations, particularly in how someone speaks about the people they’ve worked with, whether they reflect honestly on difficult situations and how they respond when uncertainty or disagreement enters the discussion. Whether they immediately try to resolve uncertainty or are willing to work through it with others can tell you a lot.

None of these things offers definitive answers on their own, but they help build a clearer picture of how someone is likely to lead and work with others.

The organisations approaching this thoughtfully are often the ones willing to look beyond the most familiar or polished versions of leadership and think more carefully about the kind of leadership their environment and communities need.