What we’re missing,” my colleague Deena Fischer observed, “is all the in-betweens.”
Deena’s referral was to the dynamics of our four day in-person coaching development sessions; breakfasts together, comments passed in hallways or a shared beverage and dinner at day’s end. All times when our coaching study group swapped stories, shared common threads, and deepened our bond.
Early June was to be our next in-person meetup in Santa Barbara, unlikely now in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are a number of things that I suspect we don’t miss until they’re gone; clean air and water come to mind. The “in-betweens” – physical space interactions with colleagues, coworkers and neighbors – are another. It’s a glue that holds us together.
Andrew Yang put the same thought a different way; “The harshest side effect of this virus is how it cuts us off from each other.”
Research from MIT behind the science of building great teams affirms that one big difference between high performers and everyone else is the degree and frequency of physical social interactions. Strong organizations have lots of quick check-ins; less performing groups don’t.
It’s the informal, rather than the formal, social contact that often binds us. The chance to find out unexpectedly when you bump into him – and he flashes out the latest pictures from his iPhone – that “Jack the jerk” down the hall is really Jack, the good guy dad with the adorable daughters of whom he is so proud.
It’s the sort of stuff that virtual meetings struggle to generate. One hour with an engaging in-person group passes by like minutes; one hour with a less connected virtual group leads to double tasking and feels like days.
One little secret of many that built early success (exceptional performance, low turnover, high candidate attraction) of my old shop Atara Bio was the employee email intro. It had all the usuals like name, title, and school attended but also, by intent, mentioned the stuff of in-betweens.
Teammates, often working at a different location, got to know that Jackie Bushong had poodles at home, that Chris Castin played baseball in college, and that Gadi Soffer was a geologist nerd and had a rock collection he kept at work. All the sort of stuff that gets surfaced normally as in-betweens when you’re spending in-person time with someone.
Research by brothers Rom and Ori Brafman found that what accelerates connections – the people chemistry the leads to trust and transparency – is vulnerability, proximity, resonance, similarity, and safety.
And even more research – counterintuitive as it might seem – for successful virtual teams is to get together physically early and then peel the face-to-face time back to working remote once rapport is established. I’ve had that same experience with the 20+ virtual startups with whom I’ve worked; establish the sense of belonging early by in-person teaming sessions and then move to remote once those connections are established.
There are workarounds and antidotes to this all this remote social distancing available; they take thought, experience, and intentionality to implement. And it helps to have a solid foundation to leverage.
One of my startup clients, for example, is doing just this during the Covid-19 pandemic by weekly 50+ person Zoom team meetings where the in-betweens as a company get purposefully surfaced so that sense of community is sustained until folks return to working side-by-side.
So while there’s great advice on how run a terrific virtual meeting, note that much of what makes it great is a way to surface those in-betweens.
So here’s the cut to the chase. We’re inconvenienced by shelter in place, amidst a pandemic that will kill loved ones in families we know, cause millions to lose their jobs and wreck social and economic damage.
We can make it less hard while many of us are working remote by remembering to honor and cherish the in-betweens.
They are the ties that bind us.
Life Back West is an occasional set of writings focused on ways people, teams and organizations can be both more effective (doing the right thing) and more efficient (doing the right thing well). More about my 30+ years of work coaching execs, start up and leadership teams can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar at the Back West blog. Now welcoming new and known clients.