Leadership is not simply about roles, titles, or decisions—it is fundamentally about relationships. Every interaction you have as a leader shapes trust, influences culture, and impacts how people experience your leadership. How you listen, respond, show care, and hold others accountable all happen within the context of relationships. This module invites you to slow down and examine leadership not as a set of tasks, but as a series of human connections that either strengthen or strain the work. By grounding your leadership in relationships, you create the conditions for growth, collaboration, and shared purpose.

Directions:
Before listening to the podcast, download the Leadership Is a Relationship Reflection Tool and complete the first section. This initial reflection is designed to capture your current thinking about leadership and relationships—what you believe, how you show up, and what feels challenging or affirming in your practice. After listening to the podcast, return to the same reflection tool to complete the remaining sections. These prompts will help you integrate new ideas, notice shifts in your thinking, and identify specific actions you want to carry forward into your leadership practice.

This is the first of two episodes with Mike Erwin, the founder and CEO of the Character and Leadership Center and the co-author of Leadership Is a Relationship, a timely book that details why leaders who prioritize relationships are more effective. It’s a conversation about the seven functions of relationship-building and the importance of prioritizing our relationships as people and also as leaders.

-Brene Brown, Dare to Lead Podcast 

In this episode, we continue to dig into how the most effective leaders prioritize relationships. They give feedback that calls attention to the behaviors they want to encourage, invest in the slow work of pulling and keeping people together, and navigate the trickiness of loyalty, a state that, if it starts to move us out of our values, can become transactional, not relational.

-Brene Brown, Dare to Lead Podcast 

Thank you for taking a few moments to complete the feedback for this module. Your input is essential to helping us continuously improve and refine our learning experiences so they are meaningful, relevant, and impactful for leaders. Please complete all sections of the module feedback to receive your certificate of completion. Your reflections and insights directly inform future content and support the ongoing growth of this learning community.