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The year before Clark Lea became Vanderbilt’s head football coach, the team lost every game of the season.
When Clark joined the team in 2021, the team started winning. By 2025, Vanderbilt won 10 games, beating six nationally ranked opponents. Clark led one of the best turnaround stories in college football, earning him SEC Coach of the Year in 2024 and 2025. On The Learning Leader podcast, Clark shared his secret: “Relatedness is our edge.” He continued, “In today’s environment, people don’t actually see each other. We don’t take time to know each other, love each other, or care about one another.” “Relatedness is this idea, this shared experience we have. It’s a sense of belonging and community. It’s a deep, foundational respect. That’s what we’re cultivating here at Vanderbilt.” “Once we learn how to see each other at that depth and understand one another, and care for one another, and fight for one another, we carry that as an edge in our performance.” Interestingly, Clark’s obsession with relatedness is not about retention. Every year, he loses team members as they graduate from Vanderbilt. But as long as they show up, he is committed to helping them strive, not merely subsist. According to the Self-Determination Theory, we each have an innate tendency to grow and a universal need for nurturing from a social environment. In other words, we crave connection, compassion, and community. We want to trust the people around us, feel like we belong, and experience caring for others. But the onslaught of AI distances and disconnects us, depriving us of relatedness and undermining our motivation to grow and develop. For relatedness to be our edge, we cannot allow it to occur accidentally or be thwarted. We must design for it. We must normalize humanity.
By designing for relatedness, we can ensure connection is prioritized and repeated, which fuels trust and belonging. Most teams don’t lack caring; they lack expressed caring. © 2026. Ann Tardy and MentorLead. www.mentorlead.com. All Rights Reserved. |