As a father I always thought the solution to bickering kids would be to send them “to their corners”; give them time to cool down; and then – when things were cooled down – they’d be able to get along, at least until the next fight.
Covid-19 and the changes we made to our organizations, our communities and our families forced everyone into corners they didn’t choose. And it was being in those “corners” that initiated the conflict rather than reducing it. It’s almost as if, as hard as it is to get along when we’re all together it’s even more difficult when we’re apart.
It’s not that there’s been no advantages to the hybrid working approach, but it may be possible that a particular kind of interpersonal challenge – the challenge of connecting – has grown in the past two years and that challenge is very much front and center, especially when we’re trying to attract, engage and keep our best performers to stand with us as we enter the battles that currently confront us.
Consider this, we need people to connect at scale and at a speed – with each other, with other teams, customers, vendors, communities, primarily because we’re trying to balance two plus years of being disconnected from them. So, the primary goal here and now needs to be to connect.
Connection is hard to achieve – especially when we get in the “you’re with us or against us”, concept that drives dysfunction in misapplying top-down leadership styles we’ve learned as boomers or “You are a hater” which we can see in younger generations. Both approaches send a similar message – we either connect absolutely and completely or we can have nothing to do with each other.
When connection fails too often, it pivots to contention. And we’re surrounded by contention. I’ve felt that increasing through the last few years, and so our team decided to do a very unscientific test. We asked a few dozen team members and friends to go to their preferred news source (online, traditional, single source or aggregator) on any day – over a ten-day period – and create three lists from that review: stories that they would see as “connection focused”, “contention focused” or stories that don’t fit into either category. As I said, this is very unscientific, especially because we refused to give criteria to guide the decision as to which news sources would be used and which stories would fit where. Here’s our results from the 26 news sources reported:
| Contention | Connection | Not Applicable | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summary | 423 | 119 | 90 |
| Percentage | 67% | 19% | 14% |
Even if the data we’ve gathered isn’t truly reflective of the way things are, I am concerned that we’re consuming a stream of information that is making it seem (at the very least) like contention is strangling connection and that the future is evolving into a nightmare.
In a world, and at a time, where connection has been harmed in recent memory, where problems seem to be mounting, we need to connect more than ever. So, what if we started with a “tiny slice” of connection rather than an all with or all against approach. At our company we call this a “with space” – which is not about total or even lots of connection – it’s a “tiny slice” that could grow but, even if it doesn’t grow, is enough to connect us to each other.
Sales and Product are set up to contend with each other (hopefully more often in positive than negative ways). So, only a new or naïve leader would be surprised when sales promises products we don’t have and product refuses to pivot to develop those products. We need to find “tiny slices” of connection.
I don’t need Prime or Netflix to show me everything I want to view (or that their algorithm thinks I want to view) but give me a “tiny slice” of shows that make my subscription worth it (just a hint – for me, more Jack Ryan, less poorly dubbed art-house flicks).
Our company, which we call “Avec-me” (half French half English) for “with me” – focuses on being with me or connecting – even in a tiny way. We know that connection increases when leaders get better at four things – Talk WITH (me), Work WITH (me), Build WITH (me), and as our relationship matures Walk WITH (me).
When you start talking with people rather than always talking at them (a bad habit some of us have fallen into) we will discover these tiny slices of connection – the WITH spaces that reduce contention and feed connection.
Decide to “re”-connect. Start talking, working, building and walking with people. Find the “tiny slices” and build from there.
