Keep Your Team Bonded While You're Apart (Quick Study)

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1:03So a leader needs to increase the interconnectedness, increase the co-elevation and the commitment of the team.

1:13Things that used to happen serendipitously at the water cooler or in the hallway now need to be engineered into our work engagement. In the old days, when we were waiting for a physical meeting to start, we would be standing around doing some level of small talk in the room. That actually quiets the fight-flight mechanism of the reptilian brain, and it increases people's courage and affinity to have open dialogue. Now, you go to virtual meetings, people are usually doing their email waiting for the meeting to start, and then they abruptly start. This significantly lessens the feeling of psychological safety and the ability to take risks.

1:50Our recommendation is you start every meeting by something small that increases affinity, that increases connectedness, that increases relationship. Number one, start every meeting with a very simple thing I call sweet and sour. Everybody go around really quick. What's going on in your lives right now that's sweet and sour? And a lot of people have a lot of sour things going on right now, but there are elements of sweet. So for me, I might say something like, I'm really excited from a sweetness perspective of the level of small conversations I've been able to have with old friends and get caught up in wonderful ways.

2:20The sour on the other hand is I do feel disconnected to family members that I would see more frequently, but we're all hunkered into our individual homes. My heart melts a little bit for that. So sweet and sour. It's a wonderful way to increase the affinity and psychological safety of the room. If we've got six to ten people in a room, having one collaborative dialogue is not going to work. You put a question on the table. You frame the question clearly. But then you break the group into small groups. The technology now affords a pause in the meeting where groups of two or three can discuss the question at hand.

3:05The power of that is that everybody's voice is heard, analyzed in small group. In that small group, people will take risks, say, with their thinking. then the peer pressure of reporting back after the fact is that people don't want to water down their points of view that they had in the small group. They'll look like cowards as they report back into the big group. So the courage is there. The analysis is there. The report back comes with that courage and that analysis into the big room.

3:41Conflict avoidance, not speaking truth in rooms, keeping things to yourself. It's one of the greatest eroders of shareholder value. We've got to have a higher degree of candor in rooms. The beginning of every meeting, identify an individual or two or three who are going to be the truth tellers in the room. And I call them Yodas. I believe that that beautiful fuzzy green character, which is the font of all wisdom and knowledge, the wisdom of Yoda exists in every team. But unfortunately, it doesn't exist than anyone individual, and it doesn't often get heard because of the conflict avoidance. Halfway through the meeting, you stop and you say to the Yodas, hey, Yodas, what's not being said?

4:24What do we need to hear? And pause and encourage people to be audacious and reward them for being audacious. Do not shut them down for their feedback. Let them take risks. This is time to give somebody the space to take a risk, be candid, be courageous. We've got to honor that.

4:44I think we're getting to the situation where we need to dig in and realize we'll be doing more virtually meetings than ever before. Find yourself a space. I call it the fluffy factor. We did some work with call centers. When someone's dog is barking in the background and you ask about the dog, it builds a personal affinity between you and that individual. When you see your kids running behind in the background, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we are all parents, we're all spouses, we're all children, we're all friends. And I think the ability to be comfortable with these kind of things today is going to be the new norm.

5:20We've got important subjects to have, but I don't think being human should be ignored nor embarrassed. I think we should just embrace the position that we're in today.

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