Perhaps no one was more qualified to make such a statement. In the span of 30 years, he twice witnessed the catastrophic results that followed the breakdown of relationships among nation states. During that same time, he also built a relationship with Winston Churchill strong enough to sustain an alliance and win a war despite many tensions and differences. By the time of his death, Roosevelt understood the power of relationships—both for good and for ill.

Few today can say the same. Here we are, almost 70 years later, and we still know surprisingly little about relationships—and certainly nothing approaching a science.

Just witness the groundhog-day nightmare in Washington, or for that matter, just think about your own organization. How often do new ideas or important changes get blocked, decisions get postponed, information get distorted, or issues get bypassed—all because of faulty relationships? Not that different from Washington, is it?

Those leaders who fail to invest in relationships do so at their own peril. We may bowl alone, but when it comes to work, ours is the age of relationships. Relationships with peers, direct reports, senior managers, investors, customers, clients, boards, suppliers, distributors—all add up to a leader’s success or failure.

Yet what can we really say about relationships today? Nothing very systematic or useful, that’s for sure. If I asked you whether you’d read a book about leadership or strategy or organizational effectiveness over the past 10 years, you’d say, “Of course.” But if I asked you if you’d read a book on relationships and how they affect leaders, strategy, or organizations, you’d say, “Hmmm. Not so sure.” That’s because there are none. Zip. Nada.

True, you can find books on difficult conversations, difficult people, interpersonal skills, and emotional or social intelligence. But these all focus on individuals as the unit of analysis—not relationships. In fact, when emotional intelligence gurus Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis went in search of a more relationship-based leadership construct, their search ended in the neural circuitry, endocrine systems, and interpersonal competencies of individuals.

Enough already. This fixation on individual leaders—their character, their styles, their personalities, their intelligences—can only take us so far. And most of the time it takes us to a place that isn’t especially useful. It’s like the old joke about the guy who parachutes into a tree, then asks a passerby where he is.

“Why, my dear fellow,” observes the passerby, “You’re up in a tree in a parachute.”

“You must be a social scientist,” the parachutist remarks.

“How on earth did you know that?” asks the social scientist.

“Because what you say is true, but not especially useful.”

To say that an individual leader is this or that—sensitive, or aggressive, or competitive, or defensive, or optimistic, or analytic—may be true. But it tells us nothing about how our relationship—our interlocking responses—might be making this or that better or worse.

More to the point, this focus on individuals is just plain wrong. For decades, cognitive psychologists have been telling us (to no avail) about the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to erroneously attribute the cause of people’s behavior to their dispositions rather than situational factors.

Ends up, we’re all exquisitely attuned to different situations. Behavioral geneticists and family theorists have discovered that different situational experiences affect even genetically programmed behavior. Some go so far as to say that relationships are the finger that flips the genetic switch, amplifying some traits while modifying others.

Consider a twelve-year study of 720 adolescents led by family psychiatrist David Reiss. Reiss and his colleagues found that relationships within a family affect whether and how strongly genes underlying complex behavior get expressed. “Many genetic factors, powerful as they may be,” says Reiss, “exert their influence only through the good offices of the family.” A child’s innate aggressiveness begets a parent’s harsh criticism, which begets more aggressiveness, which begets more criticism, and so on.

Or consider what Gary Marcus says in The Birth of the Mind: “The reason animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems based on external experience. And the reason they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes.” Marcus then goes on to say that, contrary to popular belief, this process of modification continues throughout our lives with our genes continually working together with our environments—and most important, our relationships—to define and redefine who we are by structuring and restructuring our brains.

The bottom line is this: Leadership is not a solo act. It is all about relationships.

If you don’t cultivate an understanding of how relationships work, develop, and with effort, change, you won’t survive, let alone succeed, as a leader today.

That’s why I’m dedicating this blog to relationships among leaders of all types, at all levels, from all sectors and to cultivating a greater understanding of how they work, develop, change, and impact outcomes important to all of us—things like growth, profitability, innovation, learning, change.

Like The Elephant in the Room, this blog is for leaders and aspiring leaders and for those charged with helping them. Through the blog and the website, I will raise new questions, explore new ideas, offer new insights, and give you new tools for understanding and harnessing the power of relationships.

I’d love to learn about the relationship questions, challenges, or dilemmas you face. Then stay tuned for some thoughts, questions, or suggestions. The doctor is in.

Last Fall, Diana spoke at the Stanford Center for Social Innovation. Listen to a podcast of her talk “How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength” published by Social Innovation Conversations.

You can listen to the podcast below:

Click here to download this article.

Click here to download this article.