How to Strengthen Team Connection in an Age of Growing Disconnection with Ryan Jenkins

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how to strengthen team connection in an age of growing disconnection. To draw these value bombs, I brought to Ryan Jenkins in the EO Fire studios. Ryan is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, the top worldwide thought leader on team connection, leadership futurist, and globally recognized generational experts. In today's information, we'll talk about the significance of team connection. We'll talk about what to do if there's disconnection amongst our team and connection inhibitors and oh so much more.

0:39And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ryan and our sponsors. If you've ever considered launching a show on YouTube, I may have the solution for you after launching a very successful show on YouTube in 2024, MicroStrategy Today. I've learned a lot on what it takes to create a successful show and have launched a one-on-one mentorship program called YouTube 100. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. This is the year of YouTube. Let's go. Ryan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:19Hello, Fire Nation. Looking forward to this conversation. And yeah, I think my answer to that would be meaningful success cannot be achieved achieved alone. So we can, you know, success can happen alone, but meaningful success takes connection. And that's going to be at the crux of our conversation today. And I've got a story that I will more than likely share at the end that really underscores this in a big, big way. So meaningful success cannot be achieved alone. What an open loop Ryan has left for us, Fire Nation. What a tease he is. I love it. And we're talking today about how to strengthen team connection in an age of growing disconnection.

2:00And I want to start off, Ryan, by talking about the significance of team connection. Why the heck does it even matter? Yeah, whether we know it or not, isolation and disconnection actually makes our team seven times more likely to be disengaged, seven times, five times more likely to miss work, three times more likely to underperform, and three times more likely to quit. So there's a whole host of things that go against us when we have a disconnected, isolated, disjointed team. So connection is just that important. And if we really take a step further back, and as we think about the significance of connection, I always like to point folks to the longest study of adult development ever conducted, which I'm sure many of your listeners are well aware.

2:45It's the Harvard University study of adult development. And the core mission of that study is this to find the definitive answer to a long and healthy life. Not a big, not a small undertaking by this team. And JLD recently, they have come forward and they have been very active about saying, hey, over 80 years, and it's still going on today. So after those 80 years and over 2000 people, they've studied over their whole lives. They've been very active coming forth saying, hey, this is the definitive answer. We finally figured it out. And it's not, it's not health. It's not, it's not diet or exercise or wealth.

3:18It's quality connections with others is the definitive answer to a long and healthy life. So if we keep that in the back of our mind, then we can absolutely, I can state with the absolute confidence that the single greatest predictor of yours, of mine, of all of ours, health and happiness, it's the quality of our social connections. And so it's just that important. It's our most significant need. It's not our most urgent need, right? We have food, water, shelter, all these other urgent needs, especially for entrepreneurs. There's so many urgent things that tend to take up so much mental space, but our most significant need is connection.

3:50And then I'll share one other research that I think a lot of our clients find really, really eye opening as it relates to the significance of connection. And that is how your brain reacts to exclusion. So recently, they put some researchers through an experience of exclusion and their brain lit up. No surprise there. But where the brain lit up, that was what was really, really fascinating. and it was the same part of the brain when they, you know, when they had experienced exclusion, what lit up was the same part of the brain that actually registers physical pain. So what you and I can deduce from that is being excluded is felt the same as being physically harmed.

4:31And a good way to think about it is for, you know, if we, if, if any of the listeners, if they're operating, you know, solo business, or they've got a team, you know, if you're yourself or any of your team members are showing up to work feeling disconnected, isolated, lonely, they are distracted at best and they're debilitated at worst because as if you're showing up to work with a bleeding appendage and no one wants a colleague of ours to turn to us and be like, ah, don't worry about that. Just get to work. Don't mind that gouge you have on your arm. No, because there's no way you're going to get to work because your brain is on high alert thinking, I'm in triage mode.

5:08I got to address this wound before I can show up fully. And so again, if we want to show up fully for our colleagues and for our customers and our clients that we serve, we got to make sure that we're feeling a healthy sense of connection. Cause again, we'll be distracted at worst and debilitated, excuse me, distracted at best and debilitated at worst. So again, all of this really matters as it relates to the conversation around the Significance of Connection. And a good way to summarize this first topic is exclusion paralyzes, connection energizes. And wouldn't you agree, JLD, any entrepreneurs out there, we need a little bit more energy.

5:43We can always use more energy, right? Always use more energy. I try to bring it every single episode. I want to bring my guests up a level, bring their energy up. That's why it's entrepreneurs on fire because let's go. And, you know, interesting, Ryan, your story that you just shared actually reminds me of a story. And we're going to get in the Wayback Machine right now because this is 2008. I was out of the military. I got my first job and it was in corporate finance in Boston working for John Hancock. And I joined this team that was very tight and I was the outsider. And I remember it felt physically painful to go to work for the first few weeks because I just was not included.

6:20I didn't get the inside jokes. They really weren't trying to include me either. I was just kind of like a little bit of an outsider and it sucked. And then I remember a manager pulled me aside and said, hey, John, have them over your house this weekend and throw a little bit of a party and have some fun, have some drinks, go out and we'll see what happens on Monday. And I did that. I was actually kind of shocked because everybody showed up. You know, it's a team of like eight people. They all came and we had a blast and we had some stories. And I remember waking up Monday morning being like, what's different?

6:52Oh, wow, I'm looking forward to going into work. And I went in and boom, the connection was there. I was now on the inside and like, I had a great rest of my time at this office with John Hancock, with this team as a result. And it was really interesting how that shift happened because I went from having really no connection to instant connection and a lot of fun and a lot of memories from that. So you believe, Ryan, that we need to connect our teams. And we've already talked a little bit about what happens if we don't, but I really want to go deeper into what's at stake if we don't connect our teams.

7:28Yeah. And I want to go back real quick and define loneliness for the audience, because your story is a story I think everyone can relate to. And loneliness is not, it's a universal human condition. We all experience it. And unfortunately, it's shrouded in shame, which is just so unfortunate because, again, we all experience it and it shouldn't be shameful. We should look at it as a signal. Like it's literally a signal. And like when you were experiencing that going to work, they can now I'm detached and disconnected and you weren't feeling right. Well, that was your body sending you a signal. You need to be connected with others.

7:59We are a social species. So it's a very useful emotion for us. And what people get wrong is they think loneliness is the absence of people. That's not right. Loneliness is not the absence of people. It's the absence of connection. And so there you are going into John Hancock. Yeah, there are plenty of people there. Plenty of people. Plenty of people. But what was lacking was connection. It wasn't until you had that party, the connections were forged. And that's what it was allowed you to show up to work and to really start to build relationships and focus on the work at hand. And so people get that wrong.

8:30They think, oh, let me just let me just get in the office. I'll be around people and that'll fix it. It won't. I mean, that is part of a solution, but we have to really work at this. And I think what also is encouraging, especially for any solopreneurs out there who might work remotely, if you have strong connections with family or your vendors or clients or what have you, you can still have a great sense of connection, even if you're not in the presence of people. So it works both ways. So anyway, I wanted to get that out because I think it's really helpful in this conversation. But back to your question around what's at stake.

9:08first and foremost, it's our personal well-being. Isolation can actually shorten a person's life by 15 years, which is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. It's just that detrimental. And if you think about any culture around the world, what do they do with the worst of the worst in their society? Put them in jail. And then those that aren't behaving in jail, what do we do with them? Put them in isolation. It's one of the worst things we can experience as humans. And this isn't a new conversation, right? We're all social species. We know connection is important, but we are wildly underestimating how important.

9:44And we're also thinking of it wrongly. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that as well. But so the first stake is our personal well-being is at stake. The other thing that's at stake. So when team connection is high, recruitment goes up, performance goes up actually by 56%. Engagement goes way up because we're way less likely to have sick days. and the mic drop data that we found in our research was retention gets a major boost because we're 313 % less likely to quit. And again, I think back to your story, you woke up and you were like, what's different? Oh, I'm excited to go to work because I have these connections.

10:18I have these thriving relationships. So you're not looking for another job at that point. You're ready to go to work. So these things are all at stake. And the last thing I'll share with you, I think this is really going to hit home for our listeners and those that are fighting the good fight as entrepreneurs and is, is what else is at stake is our resilience. And so this research that we, we unpacked in our book, it's they took two groups, group A and group B group A was positioned a certain distance from a hill and they were asked to evaluate the steepness of that hill. So they did just that group B was asked to do the exact same thing, except this time they had one person standing right next to them, just one person.

10:58And again, group B was completely different group of individuals, but they had two people that were together assessing the steepness of a hill. And when there was just one other person standing right next to you, they perceived the hill to be less daunting, to be less steep, to be less threatening. And in fact, there was a 30 % reduction in the perceived steepness of that obstacle. So just when we feel like we're, when there's just one other person standing right next to us, we're more resilient. And of course, with, as any entrepreneur knows, we have to be resilient. And so if it feels like you're going it alone, you've got to find folks to come alongside you because it makes things easier.

11:36That is powerful, Fire Nation. I can tell just by the vibe in the room that you're on board with this. You get it. You've been in these experiences before, but what if there's disconnection? What if there's somebody that's inhibiting a connection? Will we get into that and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. One of the reasons I chose podcasting as a focus for my business is because it gives us complete location independence. At the start of every year, we get to take out the calendar and plan epic adventures across the US and abroad. We've done a 90-day European adventure with just our backpacks.

12:11And last year, we did a 23-day river cruise through Europe that was incredible. So if you're like me and love to travel, don't let your home just sit there while you're away. host on Airbnb. Even though you might be thinking that hosting will be overwhelming, especially while you're traveling, think again. With the co-host network, it's easier than ever. Now you can hire a high quality local co-host to take care of your home and your guests. They can do everything from creating your listing to managing reservations to messaging guests and providing on-site support. So if you've got an extended trip coming up and need a little help hosting while you're away, you could hire a co-host to do the work for you.

12:52Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. Ryan, we're back and we've been talking about why we need a team, the connection, the significance of that connection. What if there's a disconnection? What if there maybe was a connection and now it seems off or there just never was a connection in the first place? How do we identify that disconnection and what do we do? A lot of different things to be looking at and signs that we can be proactively looking for when it comes a disconnection. We've identified 10 of them. I'll just give you a handful of them. One is a lack of initiative, right? So if team members around you are, you know, they stop volunteering for tasks, suggesting ideas, kind of going beyond the minimal effort required, that can be a sign.

13:35Another sign is changes in communication patterns, right? If they become highly unresponsive to a certain degree. That can be a sign. Feedback resistance is another sign. They resist constructive feedback or seem indifferent to professional development opportunities. That can be a sign. And then one that catches folks by surprise is excessive working, right? When they're working so much, and I'm sure that's, I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm guilty of this, is putting more on our plate to avoid connections or to perceive that we are too busy for connections. That can be, that can really put us in a bad spot as well.

14:13And so lots of things to be thinking about as it relates to disconnection. And the last thing I'll say about it, as it relates to this conversation around spotting it, is that when, and again, I come back to your story, your story was so brilliant that when you find yourself detached or isolated or experiencing loneliness, we turn inward, which is the exact opposite thing we should be doing. We turn inward and begin distrusting the people around us. So it can be a really quick spiral downward. And so oftentimes the disconnected person on your team won't reconnect with the team. It takes the team to proactively go out and pull that person back into the tribe.

14:51That's really, really important because if this conversation was just as easy as telling that disconnected person, hey, call your mom or hey, join us at this happy hour or, um, you know, get a pet. It's not that simple. And it often takes more effort from the team to spot it and then to proactively go, go to that person and pull them back into the team. Let's talk about inhibitors. Like what if you identify somebody who's inhibiting a connection amongst that team? What do you do? According to our research, we found there was a lot of, uh, of inhibitors that folks told us. Um, a lot of them around fear, a lot of them around just a lack of confidence, a lot of it just around apathy about, I don't think connection's that important or I think I'm connected when really they weren't connected.

15:37But I think as I was thinking about this conversation and trying to picture the audience that we'd be speaking to, I was thinking, and again, I'm lumping myself into this conversation because I'm an entrepreneur and I'm an introvert that speaks on a lot of stages as a keynote keynote speaker. And I wrote the book on connection. And so I have to constantly remind myself on these different tactics and remind myself of these inhibitors that get in the way of connection. And the one that I think that stands out the most for me, and I would imagine for many entrepreneurs, and it's the number one thing that folks told us gets in the way, and that is busyness.

16:14It's workloads and a lack of time. And time constraints just severely limit our willingness to connect with others. And so we have to, if our goal is to create really strongly connected teams and organizations, we have to find meaningful margin in our calendars. And one of the practices we teach, especially for teams that are wanting to create more connection and to put the brakes on busyness is a small practice called Connect Five, where during a team meeting, and this can be done virtually, hybrid, or in person during the team meeting, one person shares one non-work-related picture for just five minutes.

16:55That's it. And the important thing here is to put that at the top of your meeting, the top of your meeting, because what tends to happen is busyness will just bulldoze the connection right out of your meetings if we're not fighting for it. So we have to put it at the top and prioritize it and give our most significant in need of connection, the priority, the priority that it deserves. And I was just talking to a client last week where they were saying, gosh, we started doing this for several months. And what they kept saying to us is we can finally see the human behind the job. We can finally see the human behind the job.

17:28And specifically, they were mentioning this one gal that shared a picture of her marathon training. No one had any idea. They'd worked with her for three years. They had no idea she ran marathons. Come to find out she had qualified for the Olympics. No one had any idea. And now they had this new data point where they could take one step closer to actually connecting with her. And it's just a small practice. That's the one last thing to wrap up this point. It takes a lot less time and effort than you might think. So this one Connect 5 practice takes five minutes. According to research, connection can occur during a two-person interaction in as little as 40 seconds.

18:02So an elevator ride is sufficient to boost both parties' well-being as those doors open. Fire Nation, I hope you're taking as many notes as I am. I already have some ideas of how I can get my team a little more connected. And Ryan, give us one key takeaway from our conversation today that you really want to make sure our listeners get, that they walk away with. Yeah, I'll provide one more idea. And then don't let me forget to end with that, conclude with the story that I teased everyone. Oh, that open loop will be closed. I like it. Yeah, I can't leave folks hanging. Here's what we get wrong about connection.

18:42This is really, really, really important. It's too often we think that we're connecting when in reality we're just communicating. So there's two, there's a big, big difference between communication and connection. So communication is the exchanging of information. And we process this in the front part of our brain, whereas connection is a feeling of understanding and ease of communication between people. And we actually process this in the back part of our brain. So a good way to think of it is if you've ever texted, I love you to significant other, that's wonderful. That's a great pro social behavior.

19:13We should all be doing more of, but that's only communication. It doesn't become connection until that person hears the tone of your voice or they see your body language or they feel your embrace. That's when your brain kicks it over to connection, which is what we're all after. It's our most significant need. And so a good way to make this portable is to think of it like this, that communication is dealt, but connection is felt. And too often we think that we're connecting over technology and that is just false. We are not. A lot of us fall victim to the mentality that we're more connected than ever.

19:49We have texting and email and social media and all these wonderful technology tools. We are not connecting over these tools. We are communicating and we need to still lean into these tools in order to be very productive entrepreneurs. But we need to stop making the assumption that we're connecting over these over technology because that's not happening. And so, again, communication is dealt. Connection is felt in the something we all need to be thinking about. How can we trade communication for connection? Where can you trade the text message for a phone call or trade the excuse me, trade a virtual meeting for an in-person or trade the statement for a question?

20:24These are all small trade-offs we can make to cultivate stronger connection and ultimately creating stronger businesses. Let me share this story too, because again, I started this conversation around meaningful success cannot be achieved alone. And it's so true. And it's really underpinned by this, the story of Chris McCandless. Are you familiar with Chris McCandless and the Into the Wild book? No, I'm not. It was a very popular book back in the nineties. And I'll just get you up to speed really quickly on his story. So he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta. And he just had the sense of like, I wanted to disconnect from culture and society and humanity.

21:02And so he hitched hike across the United States, found an abandoned bus in the middle, the complete, you know, just the complete nowhere, the middle of nowhere in Alaska. He found this abandoned bus and he lived there. Chris did, Chris McInnes. and he lived there for several months and he was journaling the experience and by all accounts he seemed fulfilled and he was living off the land and he didn't see anyone for since he was when he was there and several months went by and he finally ingested something that made him really really ill and he became really really weak and he knew he needed to go get some help so he began retracing his steps and as he came to the the river that he initially crossed as he was trying to go find some help in the local community the river was too high it was running too fast and he was just too weak to actually cross it.

21:48So he went back to the bus and he was just dejected and he mustered the last bit of energy he could to put out an SOS and rocks in front of his bus. And unfortunately, no one found Chris in time. And on his last day on earth here with us, he went into the back of his bus where he had his bed and he journaled, he penned these final words in his journal. And it's again, it's a stark reminder to all of us and especially entrepreneurs that meaningful success cannot be achieved alone. And here's the words that he wrote in his words, he said, happiness is only real when shared. So here he thought he had everything that he wanted, but at the end of the day, it was non-existent because he didn't have another connection to actually share what he was ultimately after with.

22:33And so no matter how independent or introverted we may be, we all long to belong and we should make connection our intention. and we have to be connectable. We have to come forward in every situation, especially as entrepreneurs, thinking about how do we cultivate more connection because it's just that important. Wow, that story brought chills. Fire Nation, I know you know it was worth the wait to close the loop. And Ryan, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more of what you have going on, give us a call to action. Yeah, you can find me. The mothership is ryanjenkins.com. So I do speaking and consulting on all things connection.

23:12How do we create stronger team connection? And then we've got a bunch of tools that actually can measure the connection levels across the team. So folks want to get their hands on these free tools. If they go to connectionvault.com. So again, connectionvault, like a bank vault, V-A-U-L-T dot com. They can access those tools for themselves. And we're just maniacal about how do we measure and start seeing connection? and how do we bolster just stronger teams that can tackle the big lofty goals that they're all after. So come find me online, ryanjangets.com. I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with anyone interested.

23:49Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with RJ and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Ryan in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Ryan, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Ryan for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, focus.

24:23That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. If you've ever considered launching a show on YouTube, I may have the solution for you after launching a very successful show on YouTube in 2024, MicroStrategy Today. I've learned a lot on what it takes to create a successful show and have launched a one-on-one mentorship program called YouTube 100. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com.