Here’s a counterintuitive finding:

Teams where managers have great relationships with most of their reports experience higher turnover than teams where managers have merely okay relationships with everyone.

It sounds strange but it’s true. Having strong connections with some reports but not others is worse for retention than having mediocre relationships across the board.

This comes from research by Nishii & Mayer studying relationship variance on teams. They found that unequal relationships create perceptions of favoritism, information access becomes uneven, and team cohesion suffers. The people on the outside of those strong relationships start looking for the exit.

What Your Engagement Data Is Telling You

When you look at your qualitative engagement data, do phrases like “it’s all about who you know” or “management shows a lot of favoritism” or “my work isn’t taken seriously but theirs is” come up a lot? This is a signal that your managers are creating relationship hierarchies, whether they intend to or not.

According to Gallup research, feeling cared about as a person is one of the three key drivers of engagement. But when only some people feel cared about, it makes things even worse from a team performance perspective.

Why This Happens (And Why It’s Hard to Fix)

Managers don’t wake up deciding to play favorites. They naturally connect with people who:

• Share similar backgrounds or interests
• Have similar communication styles
• They see more often (in-office vs. remote workers)
• Remind them of themselves earlier in their careers

This isn’t malice, it’s just human nature. But the impact on team dynamics is real and measurable.

How to Improve Relationships Across Your Team

1. Map relationships honestly

In our training, we have managers do a relationship mapping exercise.

Most managers have never visualized their relationships clearly before. The exercise makes implicit patterns explicit. When they see the map, they often recognize disparities they weren’t consciously aware of: the cluster of strong relationships with people who share their background, the weak relationships with remote workers, the negative relationship that’s been deteriorating for months.

2. Establish guidelines for better relationships

Brainstorm guidelines managers can follow to prevent favoritism or perceptions of favoritism. For example:

The small talk rule: If you talk to some team members about social things (weekend plans, hobbies, family), you should talk to all team members about social things. Don’t be friendly with some and purely transactional with others.

The activity test: Before planning team activities, managers should ask: “Can everyone participate in this?” Golf outings, happy hours at bars, events during school pickup hours inadvertently exclude people and create in-groups and out-groups.

The extracurricular boundary: Avoid engaging in activities outside work with only some team members. If you’re going to grab coffee with one report, the option should to be available to all at some point.

3. Strengthen weak relationships

For relationships that have stalled at “weak but neutral,” managers need specific tactics and time to implement them. For example:

The coffee chat: Invite team members you have weaker relationships with for a dedicated conversation not about work tasks, but about them. How are you doing? What energizes you? How was your weekend? Then follow up thoughtfully on what they share.

Increased collaboration: Find a project where you can work together closely. Proximity and shared goals build connection.

Consistency: Check in regularly, even briefly. Weak relationships often result from managers simply forgetting to maintain contact with certain people who may be less visible.

4. Address negative relationships directly

For relationships that have become strained or negative, avoidance makes it worse. Name it explicitly. For example:

Open: “It’s really important to me that you feel good working on my team.”

Ask: “What’s the one thing I can do to support you better or improve our working relationship?”

Listen: Repeat what you heard to ensure understanding.

Act: Make a genuine effort to do what was requested.

Check-in: Follow up after a few weeks. “I’ve been making an effort to do X. Should I change my approach?”

This is uncomfortable, which is exactly why most managers avoid it. But leaving a negative relationship to fester all but guarantees that person will eventually leave (or worse: stay, and do subpar work).

The Cost of Unequal Relationships

When managers have strong relationships with some team members but not others, the fallout is real:

Information flows unequally. The people with strong relationships get context, advance notice, and explanations.

Opportunities are distributed unfairly. The people who managers feel connected to get the interesting projects, stretch assignments, and introductions to leadership.

Trust erodes team-wide. Even people in the “inner circle” start to worry: Is my standing secure? Could I fall out of favor? The perception of favoritism undermines everyone.

Why Standard Manager Training Misses This

Most leadership development programs tell managers to “build strong relationships” with their teams. But they don’t address the relationship variance problem. They don’t give managers tools to audit their own patterns, to notice when they’re building connection with some people and not others, or to repair relationships that have become strained.

Your managers aren’t trying to create favorites. But without explicit training on equal relationships, they’ll default to human nature: connecting with people similar to them and inadvertently creating the very favoritism that drives turnover.

The organizations that retain talent at higher rates aren’t hoping their managers figure this out. They’re teaching them how to build relationships across their entire team.

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Relationship-building is a core component of our Engaged Teams manager training. We give managers practical tools to map their relationship patterns, establish guidelines for equal treatment, strengthen weak relationships, and address negative ones—all with the goal of creating teams where everyone feels equally valued.

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