KEITH FERRAZZI: We're feeling more isolated than we ever
have before in society.
And now in social distancing, we're
going to start to feel more isolated than ever
before, so a leader needs to increase
the interconnectedness, increase the co-elevation
and the commitment of the team.
Things 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.
Our recommendation is that 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
that I call sweet and sour.
Everybody go around really quick.
What's going on in your life right now
that's sweet or/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.
The 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 6 to 10 people in a room,
having one collaborative dialogue is not going to work.
You put in 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.
The power of that is that everybody's voice is heard,
analyzed in small group.
In that small group, people will take risks, say
what they're thinking.
Then the peer pressure of recording 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.
Conflict 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.
At 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 fount of all wisdom and knowledge, the wisdom of Yoda
exists in every team.
But unfortunately, it doesn't exist in any one 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?
What 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 the time to give somebody
the space to take a risk, be candid, be courageous.
We've got to honor that.
I think we're getting to the situation
where we need to dig in and realize
we'll be doing more virtual 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 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.
We'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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