Whatever industry you’re in, you can’t do business without people. Yet, leaders under pressure tend to focus on tasks, to-do lists and deadlines. Even our language removes the humanity: human resource management. A task force. People are reduced to inputs into a system designed to maximize productivity and profit. The result? Teams become disengaged, performance and productivity fall below expectations, and morale is slowly destroyed.

Effective leadership requires a shift in mindset: To focus on people over tasks. Thus, maintaining relationships is a crucial part of leaders’ job roles.

And what makes up relationships? Hundreds and thousands of conversations and moments of connection between people over time. Many of these interactions are short and apparently inconsequential — not interactions into which you put a great deal of thought, planning or intention. Yet these so-called micro-interactions matter. Each one is like a stitch in the tapestry of that relationship, adding to its depth, color and overall shape. Alone they may seem insignificant, but over time the micro-interactions become the relationship.

Micro-interactions, therefore, have the potential to make — or break — leadership effectiveness.

Effective Leadership Is About Relationships

Leaders who rely on authority alone are rarely successful. The most effective leaders make things happen through influence and relationships: through the way they engage with their team; how they make and communicate decisions; the conversations they have. It’s about getting things done by inspiring people to want to do them and want to do them well. A large part of that occurs through everyday micro-interactions.

Conversely, when relationships between a leader and a team member aren’t working, it causes frustration, distrust, disengagement, stress and, ultimately, can cause people to leave. It is a truism backed by research that people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.

Leaders’ relationships also shape the development of their people. When training leaders, encourage them to take time to really know and understand their team members — their strengths and weaknesses, ambitions and fears — and they will be better able to provide appropriate levels of challenge and support tailored specifically to their needs.

Furthermore, leaders’ interactions with team members are where they can train and coach to build skills, reward and penalize to drive behaviors, and ultimately show they care. This doesn’t happen in one-off conversations, or periodic performance reviews. It happens every single day through micro-interactions.

Harnessing the Power of Micro-Interactions

Harnessing the power of micro-interactions starts with helping leaders understand the impact they have through their speaking, listening, habits, behaviors and their very presence. Most people live most of their lives on autopilot due to necessary capacity constraints backed by research.

This results in habitual patterns of speaking, listening and behavior that are often so ingrained that leaders are unaware of them. Even with good intentions, this can lead to unintended consequences. Leaders need to slow down and put their conscious brains to work.

If a leader happens to be working with someone for whom their patterns are a good fit, where they also reflect their preferences for working and communicating, great! Everything works fairly well. But what about when the person, conversation or situation requires a different style or approach to be effective? Unless they have the awareness to detect that, and the ability to adapt your interaction, leaders will miss the mark.

When training leaders, remind them: It’s not just about you. Building an understanding of your team’s individual preferences is equally important. How do they like to work, and when are they at their best? What ways of communicating suit them, and what ways are unhelpful, distracting or stressful? What interests and inspires them? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do they prefer to learn? When you invest time and effort into understanding your team better, it enables you to interact with each team member in a way that helps them be at their best. You can also tailor their development, not only in terms of what they need to learn, but how they learn most effectively (considering things like modality, pace, etc.). Simply making the effort in micro-interactions also demonstrates to your team that you care. This can deepen trust and engagement.

You Can’t Afford Not to Pay Attention

Paying attention to micro-interactions isn’t just a nice-to-have, optional extra for leaders. Because micro-interactions are never neutral. Every interaction is contributing to one of three things happening within the relationship. Micro-interactions are an additive, net positive, contributing to an even deeper and higher-quality relationship.

If that isn’t happening, there are only two other options, according to a concept created by Accomplishment Coaching:

One, leaders are actively killing it. Their micro-interactions are damaging the relationship, causing loss of trust and decrease in connection and understanding.

Or two, they are letting the relationship die through neglect. Whether through carelessness, a lack of self-awareness, laziness or simply not paying enough attention, the relationship is deteriorating. Their micro-interactions are insufficient, inconsistent or confusing. Trust is evaporating, and engagement is decreasing.

Consistency Is Key

Leaders can only make a difference through micro-interactions if they make the effort consistently. Trust takes time to develop; it won’t start to grow the instant they begin making changes. Equally, inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to erode trust.

In your training programs, encourage leaders to focus on being congruent between what they say and how they act, and between what they state is important and what they measure, reward and penalize. Leaders should be as open as they can about the changes they’re seeking to make, and then stay the course. If not, they risk eroding trust, rather than building it.

Leadership effectiveness is not about being perfect. Progress is never linear over time, and achieving perfection in every micro-interaction isn’t possible. But leaders do need to pay attention to their net impact and the direction of travel. When they work on eliminating or transforming those micro-interactions, which are at best frustrating to others and, at worst, cause harm, they will start to see their leadership, and their people, transform.