The Call You're Not Ready to Get
Picture your phone lighting up right now with your boss's name on the screen. No text first. No warning. A call, full stop.
What's the first feeling? Dread? A scramble through everything you might have screwed up this week? Or something closer to "oh good, it's her"?
Researcher Zach Mercurio calls this the phone call test. If an out-of-the-blue call from a leader triggers fear instead of ease, it's a signal. Not about the person calling. About every interaction before it.
I've been on both ends of those calls. Twenty-plus years in the Army teaches you fast which officers only called with orders and which ones called to ask how your family was doing after a hard deployment. You remember the difference for decades. I still do.
Why the Fear Makes Sense
Mercurio's research, covered by Atlassian, found 30% of the workforce report feeling invisible at work, and 39% say they don't have a single person there who cares about them as a person. Half the time a high performer quits, the manager had no idea it was coming.
None of this is an accident. It's the direct result of thousands of small transactional exchanges. Check-in emails mentioning only deadlines. One-on-ones reduced to status updates with a calendar invite attached. Calls arriving only when something's on fire.
Mercurio draws a clean line: if the exchange might have been an email, it's transactional. If it required real human connection, it's relational. Most leaders default to transactional. It's faster and feels productive. But every transactional interaction is a small withdrawal from an account most leaders never deposit into.
I've written before about how 99.5% of people report having had a bad boss at some point in their career. It's not about a handful of terrible managers. It's about a system where "management" quietly became synonymous with "the person who calls when you've messed up." Fix this association and you fix a lot more than turnover.
My Own Phone Call Test
I failed this test once, early in my leadership career. A guy on my team, sharp, reliable, never a problem, missed two check-ins in a row. I called him. He was apologizing before I said a word. Right then I realized every call he'd ever gotten from me had been about a problem. I'd trained him to expect one every single time the phone rang.
I changed my approach after this day. Not with a script or a formal program. With a habit: call people sometimes for no reason at all. Ask how a kid's soccer season is going. Tell someone the extra effort on a project got noticed and mattered. Small moves. They add up faster than any all-hands meeting ever will.
What Relational Leadership Looks Like in Practice
None of this requires a new leadership framework or a training budget. It requires discipline, applied consistently:
- Call without an agenda. Not every check-in needs a deliverable attached to it.
- Ask before you tell. Lead with "how are you doing," not "here's what I need from you."
- Notice out loud, and soon. If someone went above and beyond, say so the same week. Not at the annual review, months after the moment has faded.
- Sit with bad news for a beat. When someone tells you something is wrong, resist the pull toward an immediate fix. Let them feel heard first.
- Track your own ratio. Count your last ten interactions with a direct report. If nine were transactional, the tenth won't undo the pattern.
Managing outcomes still matters. None of this argues against accountability or hard conversations about performance. It argues against building the entire relationship out of outcomes and nothing else.
The 99.5% Problem Starts Small
When I dug into the research behind the 99.5% bad-boss figure, the stories weren't mostly about screaming managers or public humiliation. They were quieter, and worse for it. A manager who only reached out during a crisis. A manager whose name on caller ID meant something had already gone wrong. A manager who never once called to say "good job" without adding a "but" right after it.
Bad leadership rarely announces itself with a single dramatic incident. It accumulates one transactional phone call at a time, until an employee's nervous system learns to associate their boss's name with danger. By the time a manager notices the damage, the employee has usually already decided to leave. They haven't told anyone yet, not out loud.
Why Leaders Skip This Step
Here's the honest part. Most leaders know this at some level and still don't do it. Calling someone with no agenda feels awkward the first few times. There's a fear it will land as fake, or worse, the employee will assume something's wrong precisely because the call is unusual. This fear is real, and it's also exactly the proof the pattern needs breaking. The awkwardness fades after a few genuine calls. The alternative, staying transactional forever, guarantees the fear never goes away for the person on the other end.
This is also why blind spots like this survive so long. A leader rarely finds out their calls trigger dread, because nobody tells their boss "your calls scare me." It takes a deliberate mechanism to surface it. Part of why I built the BAT framework at Step Up To BAT around structured feedback from direct reports and peers is exactly this problem. Leaders are unable to self-diagnose a pattern they're not inside of. Someone else has to name it, and most workplaces have no process for this to happen safely.
Run the Test on Yourself
Here's the uncomfortable homework. Think of three people on your team. Picture calling each of them right now, with no reason given. Be honest about what you think they'd feel in the half-second before they answer.
If the honest answer is dread, the fix isn't complicated. It won't come from a new policy or a leadership offsite. It comes from the next ten phone calls you make. Make one of them about nothing but the person on the other end.
I think about the officers who called for no reason but to check on me more often than I think about the ones who only called with orders. Twenty years on, it's still the difference I remember most. Which one do you want your team remembering about you in twenty years?