The Relationships Holding Up Your Agency

Picture a case that should have fallen through the cracks. The referral form went to the wrong inbox. The interagency protocol said to wait for a formal request. Nobody’s job description covered what needed to happen next.

And yet it got handled. A caseworker called someone she’d known for six years at the partner agency. That person walked down the hall, found the right desk and the family got help the same afternoon.

Every public servant has a version of this story. We usually tell it as a success. I want to suggest it’s also a warning: The system didn’t work. A relationship did.

What Relational Leadership Is

Relational leadership gets talked about as if it were a personality trait. Some leaders are “people people,” the thinking goes, and others are not. That framing lets organizations off the hook.

Relational leadership is not about being nice, popular or extroverted. It is the practice of treating trust, communication and connection as working parts of the organization, as real as a budget or a policy manual. A relational leader asks: Who needs to know whom for this work to succeed? Where does trust already exist, and where is it missing? What happens to our results if one connection breaks?

Those are structural questions. They just happen to be about people.

Your Workarounds Are Load-Bearing

In most agencies, there are two organizations running at once. One lives on the org chart, in the MOUs and in the referral protocols. The other lives in phone contacts, hallway conversations and years of shared history.

The second organization does a remarkable amount of the work. It catches what the formal process misses. It translates between agencies that use different language for the same thing. It moves fast when the official channel is slow.

In architecture, a load-bearing wall is one you can’t remove without the building coming down. Informal relationships often play that role in public service. The trouble is that nobody drew them on the blueprint. Leaders see the outcomes and assume the process produced them, when the real support is a handful of trusted connections no one has named.

When the Relationship Leaves, the Structure Falls

Here is the cost of leaving that wall unmarked. When one of those trusted people retires, changes jobs or burns out, the connection goes with them. The protocol is still on paper. The coordination quietly stops.

Often no one notices right away. Referrals take a little longer. A partner agency feels a little more distant. Cases that used to move in a day now take a week. By the time leadership sees the pattern, the person who held it together is long gone, and the organization has to rebuild trust from scratch.

A Living-Systems View: Relationships Keep the Work Aligned

When organizations struggle, we tend to blame individuals: Someone isn’t doing their job. In my experience, the more common problem is that jobs aren’t aligned with the bigger picture. Each person does their piece well, and the pieces still don’t fit.

Viewed as a living system, an organization stays healthy through its connections, not just its parts. Relationships are how the parts stay in sync. They carry context that never makes it into a job description: why a deadline matters, what a partner agency really needs, which rule has some flexibility and which doesn’t.

So the informal workaround isn’t a sign that people are ignoring the system. It’s a sign that people are doing the alignment work the formal structure forgot to build. Relational leadership means noticing that work, honoring it and building it into the design.

Making Relational Infrastructure Visible and Durable

The goal isn’t to replace relationships with procedures. That would lose exactly what makes them work. The goal is to stop depending on any single connection. A few practices help:

1. Map the real routes. Ask your team who they actually call when something gets stuck. Compare that map to the org chart; the gaps show your load-bearing walls.
2. Pair every key connection. If one person holds a critical partner relationship, bring a second person into it now, before it’s needed.
3. Write down the why. Protocols say what to do. Capture the context too: what partners care about and what a good handoff looks like.
4. Make relationship-building part of the job. If connecting with partners counts as “extra,” it’s the first thing cut. Name it in role descriptions and protect the time.
5. Plan transitions around relationships. Handoffs should include introductions, not just files.

The Work Beneath the Work

The next time a case gets saved by a phone call between two people who trust each other, celebrate it. Then ask a harder question: what would have happened if one of them had left last month?

Relational leadership starts with that question. It treats the connections between people as part of the infrastructure of public service, because they are. The leaders who see those connections, protect them and spread them widely are the ones whose agencies keep working long after any one person moves on.

Megan Rodgers is a doctoral candidate and human services professional with over eight years of experience coordinating multidisciplinary teams across complex organizational systems. Her work sits at the intersection of clinical practice and applied theory, with a particular focus on systems thinking, self-control frameworks, and the institutional forces that shape human behavior. Megan has presented at professional conferences on topics including imposter syndrome, bringing research-grounded insight to audiences navigating the realities of public service. She is passionate about bridging the gap between academic theory and everyday practice; making big ideas accessible, actionable, and real.

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