Tag: connection

The simplest way to establish connection

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

We fumble through so many workplace conversations, especially the meaty ones that make our blood pressure rise.

The easiest way to stay grounded and strengthen your connection with a colleague? Actively describe what is going on for you emotionally. This means getting above the feelings with enough perspective so you can describe them to another person.

“I’m happy you said that…”

“Thank you. I find what you’re saying really helpful.”

“Hearing this helps me see the situation in a new light…”

“It’s scary to be confronted with this, so I’m feeling that right now…”

“What you’re saying is really causing me to reflect, and I’d like some more time to do that.”

The volume of our own thoughts and feelings is often so high, we can easily assume that what we are thinking and feeling is obvious to everyone around us.

It isn’t until you describe it to them.

Learning from Imperfect People

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We do it all the time. Ariana Huffington, Clayton Christensen, Nandan Nilekani, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala…we have something important to learn from each of them.

And yet, each of them may be flawed in some (or many) ways. This doesn’t mean they have nothing to teach.

And yet, when we encounter non-famous, also flawed people, we are often quick to judge. We instinctively treat them as people we have little to learn from.

They also have a lot to teach us.

There’s something they are great at, something that comes naturally to them, something that makes them special—if we’re open to it.

If nothing else, we can learn from how we find ourselves reacting to them—having a quick mind is one thing, being quick to judgment is something else entirely (and yet they often go together).

Generosity of spirit is a better way to go through the world for so many reasons. One of these reasons is that it helps remove our blinders, allowing us to learn from the person standing right in front of us.

The one who, despite his flaws, we haven’t written off.

Why We Need to See One Another

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Last week I had the chance to hang out with Trevor Noah at the Mastercard Inclusive Growth Summit (OK, we were in the same room, but that still counts, right? You can find Trevor at 1:37 in the video)?

The Summit was an amazing few days, though I admit that, at first, I found it more tiring than expected.

My recent experience with conferences feels like a post-pandemic reverberation: we’re returning to (more) normal professional routines (including time in the office and in-person gatherings), but these routines feel new enough that (a) They’re more tiring than they used to be; and (b) We can look at them with fresh eyes. This caused me to ask myself:

What is the purpose of seeing professional contacts in person?

More specifically: we’ve managed to build strong new relationships over nearly three years of a global pandemic. Might it be that all the social niceties were just a distraction? That we can get business done just fine, thank you very much, without ever meeting in person?

To me, the answer to these questions is both “yes” and “no.”

Yes, we can absolutely get much more done remotely than we thought.

Now that we’re less bounded by outdated norms, we can close new clients, raise capital, and build new, meaningful partnerships without ever getting on a plane. This is more efficient for everyone involved, and I’m surprised that more isn’t written about the positive social dividends of tens of millions of people working from home.

In fact, this all works just well enough that we could be forgiven for thinking that nothing of value happens in person. That, also, is a mistake.

We also need to invest, in person, in our most important professional relationships.

Our professional relationships are a series of interactions, leaps of faith, and surprises (both good and bad). To the extent that these relationships stay within well-grooved pathways, we can successfully manage them through a combination of Zoom, Slack and email.

But there’s a layer underneath that also must be nurtured.

It’s tempting to call this layer “trust” but that is just one outcome of being in relation with others.

Let’s unpack what it means to be in relation with others. It means we both create and discover shared experience in both present and past; develop an understanding of each others’ shared stories (both personal and professional) and common heritage. We weave together overlapping moments of identity, glimpses of one another’s motivation, and understanding the specifics of our  shared humanity. Because of how our brains are wired, these specifics are much more powerful than generalities.

All of these things tap into our basic, human sense of how we understand one another.

Now, think about what happens when something surprising occurs in one of our relationships (and nothing should surprise us any more since everything eventually happens).

One person tells the other the bad/surprising/complicated news. The other person has to figure out what to do with what they’ve just heard.

The information Person A told Person B is a tiny part of everything that’s just happened. And the question to ask is: how will Person B fill in the blanks when told this news?

Absent any relation, the answer is: randomly. The blanks will be filled in based on that person’s perspective at that moment on that day, absent any real anchor or points of reference.

But for two people in relation with each other, two people with a strong interpersonal foundation, those blanks will be filled in with shared narrative, shared experience, shared expectation, shared identity, all of which come together into what we clumsily call “trust.”

Ultimately, this feeds into the resilience of our relationships.

Because we know that curveballs are (always) coming.

The question is whether our relationships will be strong enough to withstand them.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to build resilient relationships without ever meeting in person—but it sure is harder.

What Will You Announce Today?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

“If you brought umbrellas, don’t forget them on the train.”

On a rainy Monday morning, my train conductor—after all his obligatory announcements about arriving at Grand Central and what track we’re on—adds this helpful reminder. This five second addition helps 500 people have a better, drier, more efficient day.

We have the microphone more than we realize: most obviously in what we say and what we don’t say, and whether we choose to follow the script that’s given to us.

But we also hold it as we walk down the street, or into a shop, or walking past our co-workers: the eye contact we do or don’t make, the people with whom we do or do not share a smile, the decision to stop for a moment and really, truly listen to another human being.

What will you do with your microphone today?

The blanks

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Compared to you, the people you’re communicating with (customers, colleagues) don’t have the whole story. They don’t know each and every detail, they can’t see every tiny nuance.

How could they? They aren’t you.

What they have is the information they get from you, and a whole lot of blanks.

Most of these blanks get filled in by things outside of our control: their worldview, their filters, the mood they’re in that day. But some of them are filled by the story they tell themselves about our product or about us. And the last few are empty for no good reason, because we’ve not communicated the right things to them in the right way.

This means we have two jobs.

First, and always, to communicate better, with more empathy about what the world looks like from where they’re sitting and more specificity about what we want them to feel, believe and do after they hear from us.

And second, to remember that each time we communicate, we’re doing so on two levels:

On the level of what we say, we are transmitting information, content and meaning.

On the level of how we say it, we are building out the scaffolding that they’ll use to fill in future blanks about us: future expectations about who we are, our personality, our intent, and how much we can be trusted.

Think of it as two stories: the one they’ll remember today, and the one that will inform how they fill in the blanks tomorrow.

 

(Speaking of blanks to be filled in: welcome to all of you who just showed up thanks to Seth Godin’s blog post on Wednesday. I’m glad you’re here and thanks for subscribing! And for those of you who didn’t see that post, you might want to check out a few other blogs Seth recommended: Gabe, Fred, Bernadette and Rohan.

As Seth mentioned, this blog has a backlist of more than 1,000 posts on all sorts of topics including storytelling, generosity, fundraising and sales, social change, leadership, and a lot more. Mostly, posts are a mirror of what’s on my mind, ideas I’m working through, and ideas and advice that I’ve found (or, more often, am still finding) useful.

These days, you should expect 1-2 posts per week in your inbox, so if you’re not getting them check your spam filter.

Comments are welcome, sharing posts with friends is a gift, and if you want to reach me I’m easy to find: sashadichterblogs@gmail.com)

 

Fundraising Parable

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A fundraiser asks for advice about how to get more access to the institutions who give money to her sector.

The conversation that ensues is about seeing this work not as a series of transactions, but about building real relationships, about making connection, about building a network that you value and feed, that you give to first rather than ask for things.

This conversation runs long. The fundraiser takes copious notes, nods a lot, seems excited.

And then you never hear from her again.

Pomp, circumstance, or access

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

The strangest thing happened to me the other day. I wasn’t feeling well and I emailed my doctor early in the morning.

And.

He.

Emailed.

Right.

Back.

Not just once, but twice, all in less than an hour.

It got me thinking about other places where there are mismatches between what we really want (a responsive doctor who we can occasionally hear from without making an appointment) and what we get.

If you were an alien visiting from another planet, sent to understand the relationship between funders and social sector organizations, what would you tell your superiors on the Mother Ship? You’d likely explain that people who give away their hard-earned money are mostly interested in fancy meals in expensive settings, supplemented by the occasional, sorta boring glossy report.

We throw resources at the wrong solution because it is safe: no one will get fired for putting on next years’ Gala that raises $75,000 more than this year’s, or for publishing an annual report that is good enough and mostly looks like everyone else’s.

So, you can keep playing that game, and come in neither last nor first.

Or you can decide to win at a completely different offering.

It’s the offer of permeability. The offer of the quick response. The offer that makes available useful and relevant access to your team that’s doing the work. The offer to open up the gritty, imperfect details, and the hard-earned insight and experience: things that are easy for you to share but priceless for the person on the other end of the line.

My doctor’s day is more productive when he spends more time with more people who can only be helped by a visit to his office. My day is better when I have a first-line plan of action right away, not after four hours waiting at urgent care or a week waiting for an appointment.

Providing the right kind of access is better for everyone.

If Only the Shades of Grey were Brighter

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

I knew I was pressing my luck.

I had flown in or out of LaGuardia Airport three times in four days, and I uttered the phrase, “I’ve had pretty good luck with flights this week.”

And so it follows that, for flight number four, two days later on a Sunday afternoon, I sat with my family of five on the tarmac for three hours only to ultimately return to the gate. A few hours after that, the flight was canceled.

I’d assumed that when American cancels your flight, or, in our case, five of your flights, they give a voucher for a meal or a hotel. Apparently not since “the flight was canceled due to air traffic control and not because of something the airline did or because of severe weather.”

(But the pilot told us 10 different times that air traffic control wouldn’t let us take off due to a “low ceiling in New York.” Isn’t that bad weather? But I digress.)

By my math, the overnight delay cost our family about $500: two $104 hotel rooms at the ALoft, one (terrible) dinner for five at that hotel, breakfast at the airport, an extra night of parking my car at LaGuardia, an extra night of care for our dogs, and a taxi from JFK to LaGuardia since our flight home landed at JFK.

What struck me about the experience was that this is how things work in today’s hyper-transactional economy: each step along the way is optimized by an app offering information (flight status, re-booking) and discounts (hotels, meals), and the sum of all of those micro-transactions is an experience that dehumanizes both the customer and the service provider:

The flight attendant is frustrated because she has no information or control, and the passengers are upset.

The gate agent is powerless. He just got assigned to the gate. He has no information and no discretion, and it feels terrible to give angry passengers nothing.

The airline has no obligations. It’s all spelled out in the fine print.

The one lone woman working at the hotel front desk has such a narrow job that she transfers the call three times to the van pickup and, when it goes to voicemail, she has no recourse.

The bartender has a big smile and pours a nice cold beer, but when we order a full meal off the bar menu he looks terrified. It turns out that the “grilled cheese with tomato soup” at the ALoft Raleigh-Durham is a microwaved hamburger bun with some semi-melted cheese and Cambell’s soup, all served lukewarm—because he has no chef, no pan, no stove, nothing. We’d ordered four of them.

While our 24 hours delay with a family of five was tiring and expensive, what I noticed most was how much it cried out for an ounce of humanity. The economy we’ve built optimizes so much for efficiency that there’s no space for human agency. Every step is a tiny transaction in which both people standing across from each other—service provider and service recipient—are powerless. It’s dehumanizing by a thousand cuts.

Well, not always.

On the bookends of this trip, I got to spend some time talking to Lily. Lily works at The Parking Spot at LaGuardia airport.

I first called Lily on Friday afternoon when The Parking Spot website told me that they were full, and I couldn’t park there. I called to see if this was true or if I could just show up, and Lily confirmed that I could only reserve over the website: “If it says we’re full, you can’t park here.”

So I asked her for advice, since LaGuardia is under construction and every place was full. We talked a bit more then Lily paused and asked what time I would arrive. “Three o’clock,” I told her.

“Come on over, ask for me, I’ll get you a spot.”

When I arrived, Lily and I both discovered that we knew each other a little. About a year ago, my wife and I were leaving from / arriving to LaGuardia on the same day. The best way for us to make it work was for my wife to pick up the car that I’d parked a few hours prior—without a car key, without the ticket, and with a different last name. Randomly, I had chosen The Parking Spot and ended up explaining this long-winded plan to Lily. She was great. I think she thought it was funny. She helped. My wife got the car. Lily acted like a human being.

The same thing happened with Lily this past Friday when I called, and on Monday the five of us rolled in, exhausted after a 24 hour delay. She laughed. She cracked jokes. She put everyone at ease, not because she has to but because she obviously finds joy in being helpful, saying hello, being human. And, to state the obvious, where do you think we’re parking the next time we fly out of LaGuardia?

The infinite, micro-losses we’ve created in today’s hyper-efficient world are epitomized in how remarkable Lily’s behavior is: in making every transaction smoother and a little bit cheaper we disempower everyone, and no one misses what’s been lost until it’s too late. Care, kindness and humanity now feel like luxury goods.

There is, however, a silver lining: it’s easier than ever, against this backdrop, to have the smallest actions stand out as exceptional. You can do this from the front lines. You can do this in how you build your company culture.

It’s easier than ever to be noticed, to have a bright splash of color be seen in an increasingly monochromatic economy.

Expectations

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

So much of how we experience each other bounces off everything that is left unsaid.

Expectations about how good the movie would be.

Expectations about what was meant when you were told “the meeting will start at 10:00.”

Expectations about how we will dress.

Expectations about what it means to do this job.

Expectations about what it means to work for you.

Expectations about who gets to have good ideas.

Expectations about who gets to say yes, and no.

Expectations about who gets to speak when.

Expectations about how, and how much, to agree and disagree.

Expectations about where we do our best work.

Expectations about whether showing up in person matters.

Expectations about how much care we put into saying “thank you.”

Expectations about what it means to listen, and the relative importance of listening and speaking.

Expectations about how a President is supposed to act.

Expectations about who can and cannot leave the office first.

Expectations about what silence means (in a meeting, when I don’t hear back from you).

Expectations about what you mean when you say “I’ll take it from here.”

 

It turns out that most of how we experience in the world comes from sense-making, and sense-making is a comparison between what happened and the sum total of everyone’s unspoken expectations.

Think for a moment about what this means if you’re working across…anything really: geography, culture, class, religion, age, gender, or even just two groups within the same organization.

More often than not, misunderstandings come from forgetting how different each of our expectations are, and from the mental shortcuts we all take as we fill in blanks (“what did that really mean?”) based all of our unconscious biases.

 

How are you?

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Notice how grooved we get in our reply to this question.

Either we respond with an anodyne “Fine thanks. And you?”

Or we use it as a chance to vent about the last three things that went wrong in our day.

Here’s an idea: use this as a moment to consciously, genuinely share the most positive thing that’s happened recently, or one thing you’re looking forward to.

By sharing that emotion and that energy, the person who was kind enough to ask can feel that and pay it forward.