The Hidden Infrastructure Behind Organizational Culture and Performance

I’ve always been fascinated by relationships: how they are formed, maintained, unraveled, and repaired. Relationships have been central in both my personal and professional life. My parents and siblings gave me the support and encouragement I needed during formative years and that set me on a positive trajectory, and my wife and kids give me a sense of meaning and purpose far beyond work. Professionally, relationships have opened doors to opportunities I never could have secured alone and provided critical mentorship and feedback that shaped me at every stage.

Years ago, I created a simple “relational capital” scoring system to track the strength of my key professional relationships. I still use it today. Think of it like a bank account. Significant conflict and misalignment counts as withdrawals, while productive trust-building interactions count as deposits. A negative balance signals work to do; a positive one means the relationship is strong. Withdrawals are inevitable from time to time, but my goal is to do what I can to move the balance of each to the black over time.

This may sound a little excessive (and perhaps it is), but here’s the point: relationships matter, and they are worthy of the time and effort it takes to build and sustain them. Supportive relationships can elevate our potential, while unhealthy relationships can steer us in the wrong direction. Relationships sit at the core of much of our success as well as our struggles. Relationships play a more important and influential role than we may wish to give them credit for, and they’re performance multipliers when leaders know how to harness them.

Beyond my personal anecdotes, there’s a large and growing body of evidence showing how important relationships are to our happiness, health, work, and even our communities.

What the Research Shows

Health and longevity: A meta-analysis of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 participants found that people with stronger social ties had about 50% higher odds of living longer as compared with those with weaker ones.^a It is not just about how many connections we have, but how strong they are.
Happiness across life: The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running since 1938, consistently shows that good relationships are the single best predictor of lifelong health and happiness. The people most satisfied with their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.^b
Work outcomes: Harvard’s SHINE research reveals that when people feel a sense of belonging at work, they are 2.2 times more satisfied, 1.5 times more productive, and 1.6 times mentally healthier.^c Relationships with managers, peers, and cross-functional colleagues all play a role in shaping this experience!
Flourishing globally: The Global Flourishing Study, spanning 22 countries, found that relationships, community, and prosocial character are stronger predictors of flourishing than financial stability.^d As VanderWeele and colleagues explain, our flourishing is tied to the flourishing of our communities.^e

Our Intricate Web of Relationships

Depending on your role and life stage, you may have relationships with some or all of the following people:

Immediate family
Extended family
Friends
Neighbors
Direct reports
Skip-level reports
Peers
Manager
Skip-level Manager
Cross-functional colleagues
Customers
Vendors
Community connections

Some of these are vital while others are more peripheral. Each relationship serves a different purpose and requires deliberate effort to nurture. They grow stronger with consistent attention, open communication, trust, empathy, and shared experiences. When effort is not reciprocated, they weaken.

Holding all of these relationships in a delicate balance is challenging. If you overinvest in one area, such as work, other areas like family, health, or hobbies may break down. Eventually that neglect undermines the very performance you were chasing. This is sometimes called the dark side of engagement: when an extreme level of engagement over an extended period becomes unhealthy and counterproductive.

Workplace Relationships

We spend more waking hours with colleagues than with family or friends, so how we experience those relationships affects every other part of life. The reverse is true as well. Our personal lives shape how we show up at work. (Unless you have undergone the “Severance” procedure from the 2022 psychological thriller, in which case none of this applies of course.)

Workplace relationships are especially complex. You might have a strong connection with your manager but none with your skip-level manager. Or you might be tightly connected cross-functionally but barely interact with your formal team. These dynamics matter. They can help explain why employees vary in their levels of engagement, performance, and retention.

In 2025, most of us understand that social networks are not the same as relationships. Many people have large networks, but most connections are weak and transactional. True relationships are defined by quality, not quantity. We can be surrounded by people and still feel disconnected, and a handful of strong ties often matters far more than a vast but shallow network.

Take onboarding, for example. You may sit in a room with 30 new hires, but initially those ties are surface-level (you know names, titles, and locations). Upon joining, you sit on the periphery of the organization with weak connections but over time, people make introductions, engage you in projects, and pull you into the center of the network. These connectors help you access relationships that are critical to success but may have otherwise remained out of reach.

Each of these relationships impacts our experience in important ways.

Relational Experience

I’d like to introduce a concept to capture the critical role relationships play in shaping the employee experience: relational experience.

Relational experience is how people perceive and experience their workplace relationships across teams, projects, and organizational communities. It reflects not just who people are connected to, but how those relationships influence engagement, culture, well-being, and performance.

Most coaching and nudging approaches ignore the complex web of relationships influencing perceptions, experiences, and intentions in organizations. The powerful dynamics across cross-functional projects, informal groups, and social networks that I wrote about in this article are critical to influencing change. When organizations integrate employee experience data with relational analytics, they unlock insights that reveal hidden and insidious drivers of engagement, performance, and retention.

Leaders often lack visibility into the quality of these relationships, but understanding and influencing them is critical. Managers may not see the developmental opportunities that manifest in the interactions beyond their immediate team. And if those cross-functional relationships are weak, employees may miss out on feedback from these critical partners and the growth that needs to follow.

Relationships are the connective tissue of organizational life. They influence whether employees flourish, whether teams thrive, and ultimately whether organizations perform.

I’d love to hear your perspective:

If you had insight into the relational capital scorecards of your team, would it change how you lead?
How could relational intelligence be integrated into your performance management practices?
How would the employee experience change if relationships were seen as the foundation of engagement?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’m curious to learn how others are making relationships a lever for performance!