Whose Tide?

We’ve argued that relationship-building creates a rising tide in organizations. And the natural next step is confronting what the metaphor doesn’t capture: tides don’t lift all boats equally when some boats are anchored to the bottom.

When a senior VP shares a personal struggle in a leadership meeting, the room calls it authenticity. When a junior analyst shares a similar struggle, the room questions their readiness. Same behavior, wildly different consequences. Herminia Ibarra’s research on professional identity confirms what most people already sense—vulnerability carries a power gradient. The higher your position, the more latitude you get to be human.

This asymmetry runs through common relationship-building practices. Networking advice assumes existing social capital. “Grab coffee with someone outside your department” works differently for a director with calendar authority than for an hourly employee who needs permission to leave their station. Organizations that espouse work-life balance while promoting people who answer emails at midnight systematically disadvantage caregivers—and McKinsey’s Great Attrition research tells us why this matters. Over half of employees who quit cited not feeling valued or not belonging, while their employers assumed they left for better pay. Non-White employees were even more likely to cite lack of belonging. The gap between why organizations think people leave and why they actually leave is itself a theory-in-use gap.

Relationships remain the operational foundation of every functioning organization. The work now is making that foundation load-bearing for everyone, not just those with positional power.

That requires a sharper formulation: Relationship infrastructure is foundational, and its design determines whose relationships actually develop. The second clause does the work. It moves us from aspiration to accountability.

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Three practical adjustments make this operational.

• First, audit whose relationships actually develop. Most organizations track engagement scores in aggregate. That masks enormous variation. Break the data by role level, tenure, and demographic group. If senior leaders report strong relational connections while frontline employees report isolation, there’s a seawall in the system. Monthly pulse surveys—two questions, disaggregated—can surface these gaps before they become attrition.
• Second, redesign vulnerability norms to account for power gradients. A team exercise where everyone shares equally assumes an equal playing field that doesn’t exist. Senior leaders go first and go deeper. Junior team members choose their own level of disclosure. The protocol shifts the exposure burden up the hierarchy where the professional risk is lowest—the leadership equivalent of leading from the front.
• Third, measure theory-in-use gaps by group. Your organization says it values balance. Who actually takes parental leave without career consequences? Who gets promoted after using flexible scheduling? If the answer skews toward one demographic, the espoused values are functioning as a recruitment brochure rather than an operating system. Calendar audits and promotion pathway analysis, disaggregated quarterly, reveal what the culture actually rewards versus what the mission statement claims.

The gap between strategy and execution shows up here with real consequences. Every unaudited assumption about equal access to relationship-building is a structural barrier wearing a friendly face.

Relationship infrastructure remains the foundation—and we build it with the same rigor we’d apply to any critical system, testing for load-bearing capacity across the entire organization, not just at the top. A rising tide engineered with equity in mind is the one that actually delivers on the promise.

Sources: Vulnerability and professional identity research draws on Herminia Ibarra’s work, particularly Working Identity (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) and “Impossible Selves” (INSEAD Working Paper, 2016). Attrition data comes from McKinsey’s “Great Attrition” research (2021), which surveyed employees across industries on why they left their jobs. The theory-in-use framework originates with Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, 1974). Pulse survey and implementation design principles align with the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), developed by Damschroder et al. (2009) in Implementation Science.