Who leads on relationships?

I have been reflecting a lot in the last few months about an existential question: Who am I?

In a work context at least, I am never quite sure of my identity. And let me reassure you that although this starts out as a question that’s of purely selfish interest, it opens up a space that has implications for all organisations that make it worth sharing.

For the last decade or so, I have described myself as an operations person. I’ve had “operations” in my job title. I’ve been on “operations” courses. I’ve spoken at “operations” conferences. But is “operations” what I do? And if it isn’t, what is it?¹

A lot of what interests me, and a thing I write about often in this blog, is relationships.

Relationships interest me professionally because I think the best work happens, more often than not, in contexts where people have great relationships. Good relationships make it easier to do so many of the things that make an organisation really effective. Things like

• freely sharing ideas,

• having spirited debates about the best way to solve a problem,

• telling other people when you think they are wrong,

• not being precious about who does what,

• ‘going the extra mile’ when it is needed, and

• helping other people when they are stuck.

These are some of the features of true teamwork, which is the secret sauce of sustained high-performance.²

We can see why that’s the case by reasoning it through from first principles: We build organisations to do work that we cannot do alone. To be an organisation is to be a group of people working together. To be an effective organisation is therefore to be working together effectively. Teamwork, in other words.

But teamwork is not effortless.

We are social animals, and we easily get caught up in interpersonal drama. It’s part of our nature as human beings to fall into the trap of reactivity, where we end up losing our sense of empathy and defaulting to blame. To work as well as possible with other people, we need to learn to communicate and relate in a more mature way - and to face the challenges of putting those lessons into practice.

So: who is responsible for making this happen? Who’s job is it to lead an organisation’s efforts to have excellent teamwork? Or to put it in as few words as possible: who leads on relationships?

If your organisation sells software, the answer should be obvious: it’s the CTO³.

I subscribe to the CTO Craft newsletter. It’s full of links to interesting articles, even if you are not in a technical role. One of the standing topic areas is “Culture, People & Teams”. Here are the titles of sone articles shared over the last few months:

• Why a High-Trust Environment Is More Important Than Working With Smart People

• How Organisational Dynamics Break Collaboration

• How Conflict Avoidance Quietly Wrecks Team Dynamics

• Communication Currents: How to Read and Enhance Your Team’s Information Flow

• Social and Organizational Heuristics

I think this shows that CTOs are interested in relationships and communication, and regard these subjecs as part of their professional curriculum. If you want to get better at being a CTO, you will want - among other things - to learn about how to cultivate great teamwork in your organisation. And then of course you will also have to do that, by continually setting out your expectations, teaching the necessary skills, and giving people feedback on how they are doing. This is all part of the job for a great CTO.

But who is it that does these things in organisations that don’t have a CTO (IE most organisations)?

The answer that I’ve been pushing for is that it’s the COO who fills this space, and that teamwork and other ‘way of working’ concerns are part of ‘operations’.

I think there is a logic to this view. “Operations” is the department responsible for making an organisation function. That includes looking after systems, processes and tools - but doesn’t it then also naturally include looking after the people part of an organisation? If operations is about improving the way work gets done, and work is always done by people⁴, isn’t “teamwork” an operations issue?

Isn’t it also true that, in broad terms, that a COO is seen as the more internally-facing complement to the (more externally-facing) CEO?⁵ One of the big advantages of hiring a COO that the CEO gets to focus more on high-value stakeholders and strategy, because they have delegated the internal issues. That all seems to point to ‘teamwork’ being an operations issue.

But - if these concerns are part of operations, where are they being talked about? Why are they not regularly covered on podcasts aimed at COOs? Why are other operations leaders not writing about them more often? Why do they not feature more explicitly and prominently at conferences aimed at senior operators?

Maybe they are, and I’m not just seeing them? But my sense is that the focus is more on finance, risk, strategic planning, AI, etc - and less on “how do you help people to talk to each other in a productive and meaningful way?” There is, in other words, a lot of focus on processes and tools and rather less on people.⁶

Hence: my personal dilemma about whether what I do is best described as “operations”, or as something else.

But hence also the broader point, which is likely to be relevant to you, which is:

Where does responsibility for cultivating great teamwork sit in your organisation?

Regardless of department or job title, it’s useful to ask:

• Is “cultivating great teamwork“ clearly part of someone’s job - ideally written in their job description and incorporated into any formal performance management?

• If it is, is the person doing that job able to devote sufficient time and energy to it on a regular basis?

• If it isn’t (or they aren’t), what does that mean for your organisation?

• If it’s a problem, what simple steps you could take to create more headspace (and heart-space) for these issues next year?⁷

I think these are big but worthwhile questions to take with you into the final weeks of 2025. If you want someone to talk to about them, get in touch in the comments. I look forward to joining you with more posts in 2026.

1. Of course, nobody agrees on exactly what ‘operations’ is. But I think that turns out not to be relevant to the questions I want to raise here.

2. Or at least, one of the main ingredients of that sauce. Teamwork helps you move fast, but you still need to move in the right direction. Peter Drucker never said “Strategy eats culture for breakfast” - but even if he did, culture without strategy is meaningless.

3. Chief Technology Officer, which is the role with overall responsibility for the parts of the organisation that do the actual building of the software.

4. Machines are only ever tools being operated by people. This is true even with the most advanced machines, like the current wave of AI. There is always a human somewhere.

5. Of course the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ cannot really be separated - they are just different perspectives on the whole that is the organisation.

6. A friend who worked in consulting was taught the mantra “people, then processes, then tools”. Oft repeated, but rarely followed!

7. It could be through some regular coaching sessions with me.