Connection is a powerful strategy used by enlightened leaders to transform their workplaces and create dynamic and powerful teams. These teams are not only capable of weathering adversity but achieving high levels of performance excellence.
Creating and sustaining positive and energized connections with people, much like developing self-awareness, is a deliberate and willful act. It requires a programmatic, systematic methodology that must be continuously monitored, updated, and checked for quality. It truly is a strategy that must be developed, communicated and embraced by all participants. No one is exempt. No one is above it or below it.
Connection, as a strategy, becomes very personal. It requires a deep understanding of, and change in, behaviour, and it requires self-examination of what you want to accomplish with the connections being forged. Whether you desire less interpersonal conflict, better performance, fewer miscommunications, greater productivity, fewer turf battles, or higher employee engagement, you must learn and apply the specific behaviour skills and mindsets of making highly positive emotional connections. It also must be specific and measurable. At the heart of a ‘connection strategy’ is the acceptance that people come first. An organization cannot become what its people are not. That being said, the mantra of any connection strategy must be ‘People first.”.
If you’ve been paying any attention to the new movement in leadership development, you know that in order to lead today’s ‘knowledge’ workers you must know how to connect on a human level. Human behaviour begins the connection. Your personal behaviour profile is perfect to connect with about 25% of the people you lead. For the other 75% you must know how to adjust and flex in order to make the connection, and most importantly, you need to know what they need and what is important to them. You need to pay attention.
When done right, employee attitude, satisfaction and/or engagement surveys provide valuable information to the organization. Too often however, leaders do not take seriously the workplace barriers and emotional barriers identified by their employees. Corporate survey efforts become a way to appease employees or to follow industry standards, not to genuinely remove barriers by changing disruptive working conditions or improving the quality of life for their people. 
I recently had a conversation with a friend about a conversation he had with the pilot of the plane before boarding for a trip. The pilot was clearly not happy and he indicated that senior management was so detached and in his words, “so uncaring for the needs of their industry”, that after 14 years as a commercial airline pilot he was going to abandon his childhood dream of being a pilot and pursue another career field. In the pilot’s words “corporate burdened us to such a degree, I no longer care to fly.” These are not words that my friend wanted to hear from the individual about to fly the airplane he was traveling as a passenger in. 
Jason is the CEO of a large, independent service-providing organization. Highly educated, he is very talented in the business sciences and executes on those skills with flawless precision. As Jason progressed through the company, his hyper competitiveness and ambition exposed a deficiency in his behaviour skills that now plague his senior leadership influence and effectiveness. He exerts his power to intimidate his C-suite team members. His anger is evident when he is dissatisfied with results.
Over time, negative experiences erode the leader’s influence. This is particularly true for leaders who give plenty of lip service to forging effective relations but whose behaviour does very little to advance that cause. These leaders ignore or do not seek feedback, do not listen to others or share information with them, micro-manage their staff, allow their emotions to control them, take accomplishments for granted, and offer more criticism than aid and resources. None of these behaviours is conducive to making and sustaining connections. They breed cynicism, distrust, and resistance to change — even those behaviours that potentially improve organizational functions can fall to the negative. Worse, they can bring productivity to a screeching halt. 
Relationships, by their nature, require constant and consistent tending. The quality of the care you put into relationships with your colleagues translates into either a negative or a positive experience. That is, the other person perceives every one of your interactions as good or bad. If you behave poorly during a contact, that experience is considered negative; conversely, if you conduct yourself well, that experience is counted as positive. This idea is similar to the emotional and trust bank accounts presented by Stephen Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in that connectivity has a cumulative effect. The more interactions are seen as negative, the less likely you are to develop connections. If you want to increase the positive experiences and thus enhance your connections, you must improve your individual leader behaviour and emotional awareness – your self-awareness. 
“If a leader can’t get a message across clearly and motivate others to act on it, then having a message doesn’t even matter.” –Gilbert Amelio, former CEO of Apple. Methods, tools, technologies, protocols, and systems do not achieve results. People do. It is with people, then, not with processes, that organizational leaders must form a long-lasting, positive, emotional connection. This connection is what ultimately determines the success or failure of the leader specifically, and the organization as a whole. Gilbert Amelio learned this lesson the hard way in his short-lived tenure at Apple. 
Self-examination reveals many things, including your level of sincerity, which is a trait all enlightened leaders share. Sincerity is synonymous with genuineness, honesty, and authenticity. In his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey presented the concept of emotional bank accounts. 
A leader’s emotional awareness is important because employees relate to their leaders on an emotional level in several ways: