Michael Canning is global head of new businesses at Duke Corporate Education.Adding chitchat to your bot makes it more conversational and engaging. Leaders must invest in spaces that enhance relations – in both the physical and digital worlds. Remoteness undermines the chit chat imperative. Remember the Scheins? Next-level relationships are needed if teams are to collaborate and create at speed.
Yet the people with whom they work miss the informal chats, connections and coaching they once enjoyed between office meetings. Leaders might be comfortable working remotely, attending and running meetings. It has physically – and figuratively – dragged people apart. The pandemic has stretched relationships. It unearthed two disturbing trends: one, people’s networks are shrinking and two, leaders are falling out of touch with employees and need a wake-up call. Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries. One staffer in Durham even brought her newborn to the North Carolina office to meet her New York teammates. Both offices were able to easily engage in chit-chat moments. Magically, the screen was located not in a staid conference room, but next to the coffee station. The screen showed the New York office in real time. But, as I approached, I realized it was actually a digital screen hung vertically to mimic a door. I could see people walk past on the other side of it. While visiting its Durham office, I encountered what seemed to be a vertical door into a brick wall. ‘Two offices, one company’ is central to its ethos. How do you create those chit-chat moments across geographies? McKinney is an advertising firm with major offices in New York City and Durham, North Carolina. This formed a natural pathway for understanding key issues, and creating a sense of shared ownership in the direction of the company. As engineers walked by, he stopped them for chit-chat moments.
#Chitchat com free#
So, instead of the usual posh office of a C-suite executive, he set up shop in a small office with no door, located across from the free soda machine. Szulik was a non-engineer leading a company of engineers.
Another example is former Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik. Xerox PARC understood this – hence its positioning whiteboards and ‘conversation’ chairs in hallways. Siang neatly frames this ‘the chit-chat imperative’. Research by the MIT Human Dynamics Lab shows that the best performing teams spend around 50% of their time communicating outside formal meetings. As Sanyin Siang, executive director of Duke University’s Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics, notes, team coaches need to create space for informal moments. Learning to discover commonalities and appreciating differences across the team is a valuable part of building the team’s relational platform. He urges teammates to do the same with each other. One involves listening to the music that his players love, understanding what they like, and what they respond to.
He uses several techniques to stay in touch with his team. Each year the age gap between Coach K – real name Michael Krzyzewski – and his players increases. Take the legendary Coach K of Duke University’s basketball team. This requires team leaders to become coaches, developing a team environment and relational platform to build Level 2 relationships between team members.īuilding this relational platform begins with being curious and interested in those we work with. Yet it is equally essential for leaders that they also cultivate next-level relationships between team members. Leaders must elevate the quality of their own relationships. It’s being able to say in actions and words, “I want to get to know you better so that we can trust each other and work together to get our jobs done better.” Level 2 relationships begin by knowing the whole person and not just perceiving others by the role they fulfil. “Leaders of such teams need to shift from Level 1 transactional relationships to Level 2 personal, cooperative, and collaborative relationships,” write leadership gurus Edgar and Peter Schein in their book Humble Leadership. Leading amid maximum uncertainty, complexity and with a need for speed requires teams to operate with new levels of fluidity, collaboration and trust. A novel operating environment demands a radical approach.
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