“Does anyone have any difficult client scenarios that they want to share?”
The Zoom call was silent. Everyone shifted in their chairs, their eyes scanned back and forth and there wasn’t a smile insight. No one wanted to share their thoughts with Brandi. The silence seemed to drag on forever, and no one felt comfortable coming off of mute to share their struggles.
“If you can’t share about your clients on this call, how are you going to problem-solve issues live with them in the future?”
Brandi was trying to motivate the team to share, but it came across as shaming, and it didn’t work. Finally, someone piped up to break the awkward silence and Brandi began dissecting every word.
This was exactly why no one spoke up. In the past, Brandi tended to jump on her team members if they misspoke or didn’t know the correct answer. The spotlight shone brightly on whoever had the guts to speak up, and Brandi’s response, an interrogation in front of the group, was an unintentional punishment for being courageous. She meant well, but the team felt totally disconnected from Brandi.
Brandi had been promoted into a leadership position 10 years prior, and she rose in the ranks because of her keen eye and her ability to speak her mind bluntly and clearly. With the old guard, her approach was viewed as necessary and valuable in shaping up the team, and she was not one to mince words when she felt someone was not as on-point as she thought they should be.
But 10 years later, in the current workplace, her approach felt cutting and abrasive. She intimidated the team, and people didn’t trust that it was safe to speak up. Her desire to be right and to correct others meant that they didn’t think it was okay to make mistakes, and that perfection was the expectation at all times. As a result, the team’s willingness to experiment, innovate and be creative was stifled.
Every meeting was a widening of the connection gap. Connection gaps happen when what you need emotionally from someone and what you receive emotionally from them do not match up. These connection gaps not only impact interpersonal dynamics; they negatively affect outcomes as well.
What the team really needed from Brandi was a bit of softness, vulnerability and a willingness to show her own flaws. They needed her to model what she was asking them to do: sharing about her own challenges and how she had struggled to navigate them. However, what Brandi projected was an air of toughness, being walled off and striving for perfection. She had learned from her mentors that leaders don’t show any type of weakness, but she made herself unapproachable by behaving in this way.
Brandi wondered why no one was willing to share. She pushed more and more, but she wasn’t getting a different response from her team. She scheduled follow-up meetings, thinking that the team just needed more touchpoints, but in each meeting, she encountered the same team dynamics. She couldn’t see that she was creating and widening the connection gap every time she hosted these meetings and showed up with this type of leadership approach.
The problem was that Brandi wasn’t self-aware enough to recognize the impact her approach was having on team trust, and she didn’t ask the team for feedback on how their relationship with her was going. Even if she asked, the team didn’t feel comfortable being honest with her about their feelings of fear, anxiety and intimidation when interacting with her. They worried that they would be reprimanded or that it would be held against them in the future. Dr. Amy Cuddy’s research found that leaders who project strength before warmth run the risk of eliciting fear. Once you establish warmth, your strength is a welcome reassurance.
In order to better understand these types of dynamics, I conducted my own research study alongside industrial and organizational psychologist and professor Dr. Mallory McCord to examine the impact attunement and misattunement in the workplace have on team trust, connection, productivity and job satisfaction.
Other studies have looked at the importance of attunement/misattunement in parent-child dynamics and other types of relationships, but our study is the first to examine the relationship between attunement/misattunement and work outcomes.
We adapted a mentor attunement questionnaire created by Julia Pryce and Kelsey Deane to be relevant in the work sphere, and we asked questions relating to the supervisor’s ability to show empathy, their capacity to adapt their responses and their willingness to meet others’ needs. We also asked questions relating to team attunement and its impact on trust, connection, productivity and job satisfaction.
We studied the relationship between the aforementioned work outcomes and the four components of attunement (FRSC): flexibility, reading cues, self-regulation and collaboration.
Flexibility is the acknowledgment that different people require different approaches. It encompasses meeting people where they are, adapting behaviors accordingly and being sensitive and responsive to another person’s cues.
Reading cues entails accurately gauging what is being said and what is left unsaid in interactions. It involves picking up on subtle shifts in tone, body posture, demeanor and language.
Self-regulation requires awareness and responsiveness to internal emotional states in order to better manage and modify them moment to moment. This allows a healthier, more resilient response to challenges and others’ emotions.
Collaboration, as it relates to attunement, is a dynamic process where individuals and teams work together in a state of connection and mutual responsiveness. The relationship is well balanced and reciprocal.
The survey was taken by 490 participants, ranging from people who work for micro-enterprises and small and medium enterprises to large private enterprises, publicly listed/traded enterprises, and other workplaces.
We asked participants to rate on a Likert scale (using the response options strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, and strongly agree) their perceptions of their supervisor’s level of attunement to them.
Some of the questions included are as follows:
- Does your supervisor observe your facial expressions and gauge how you are feeling?
- Does your supervisor see where you are coming from?
- Do they push forward their own goals during the conversation?
- Do they encourage your ideas?
- Do they suggest changing an activity because they sense you are not interested?
- Do they try to learn more about your concern before offering a solution?
- Do they match their approach or response based on your verbal or nonverbal cues?
- Do they ask for feedback on how your relationship is going?
- Do they adjust their expectations based on your verbal or nonverbal responses?
- Do they notice their own reactions when speaking to you?
- Do they get a sense of what you are feeling without you telling them directly?
- Do they adapt their approach based on your preferences?
- Do they pause a conversation to reflect on what they are thinking and feeling in the moment?
Interestingly, we found that when supervisors had higher levels of attunement behaviors, team members reported higher levels of psychological safety, satisfaction with their job and satisfaction with their team; higher team cohesion and connection; higher team productivity; higher individual productivity; higher trust in their team; and higher trust in their supervisor.
The supervisor’s willingness to anticipate their team’s needs, meet them where they are, show empathy and adapt their approach to match what was needed in the moment made a statistically significant difference in these work outcomes.
Ultimately, attunement was good for business.
These results are especially important because every workplace wants to have happy, high-performing employees who stay with the company for years and years. Yet many companies are missing the mark. They are putting Band-Aids on gaping wounds within their work culture, and they are focusing on addressing the symptoms instead of the underlying problems.
Companies throw pizza parties, organize work happy hours and give employees gift cards in the hope that employees will feel appreciated. They think that little shows of gratitude make up for an unhealthy culture where people’s needs aren’t being met and where people don’t feel trusting and safe.
These interventions don’t address the underlying drivers for improved work outcomes. This is not what employees desire, and this is not the key to working well.
As our research shows, the secret sauce is having a workplace where employees feel heard, understood, cared for and supported. They want to feel like they can trust their bosses to have their backs and to create a sense of safety for them to be creative, make mistakes and thrive. They want supervisors who will advocate for them and ensure that their priorities are their boss’s priorities. And they expect that their boss will shift and adapt their approach to meet their ever-changing needs.
The bottom line is that happy, healthy, high-performing workplaces reduce the frequency of connection gaps.
Excerpted from Working Well: How to Build a Happier, Healthier Workplace Through the Science of Attunement by Nidhi Tewari with permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Nidhi Tewari, 2026.
