On Connection

Essentiality is a powerful skill that helps you be clear, with yourself and with others, about what is most important. When you practice getting down to the very essence of what you need others to hear from you, or what others need you to hear, that is an act of valuable communication and an act of care.

Communication - the quality of conversation we hold ourselves to and our sense of timing - is an absolutely critical piece of leading and working in a way that drives value and vitality. Getting clear on what is most important to bring to a conversation and what is most important to listen for helps improve efficiency, yes, but also builds trust, connection, and accountability.

Roger Henderson joins Mickey and Emma Rose to discuss why essentiality matters and how to practice it.

Decision making is a critical part of moving projects forward and leading success for any team or organization. While there are numerous frameworks, processes, and methods to pick from, the best method is the one that gets you to have the conversations you need to have. The conversations ARE the work of decision making, and it's through those conversations you generate alignment, increase shared understanding, create clarity around roles and contributions, and ultimately build cultures of trust and belonging. 

In this episode, Robin Anselmi and Patrick Kennedy join Emma Rose to share what they've learned from leading, participating in, and supporting the work of decision making.

As leaders and businesses prepare for 2023, "recession" is on everyone's minds. It's a responsibility of leadership to consider what pressures and challenges may be on the road ahead. Holding the reality of uncertainty along with a hopeful vision for the future is a skill, and one that can be compromised if we allow fear to dominate. 

Fear has a tendency to cause retraction – tightening of budgets, cuts of staff, yes, but also more generally in the human experience we do tend to pull away from others. Whether economic pressures worsen next year or not, what if the more imminent threat to our organizations is actually a recession of connection?

Most organizations in the world are experiencing dynamic change and facing uncertain futures. At the same time, their people are stressed, overwhelmed, and facing dynamic change and uncertainty themselves. Businesses face challenges of increasing complexity, which require high degrees of connection and collaboration to successfully navigate.

Stress and uncertainty generally make human beings contract and pull away from connection, which can compromise collaborative efforts. In this episode, Kell Delaney joins Robin and Emma Rose to discuss the ways teams and leaders can move through these challenges and make progress on their important goals, leaning into connection and community for greater resilience and collective intelligence.

It’s not uncommon today for leaders and employees to place significant importance on workplace culture. Culture and work environment is a major deciding factor for job hunters, hiring managers are tasked with assessing “culture fit” when hunting for talent, and increasingly caring for culture is considered a strategic imperative for business success. This word gets used so often and is weighted so heavily in the working world today, we thought it wise to take a pause and ask… what is culture? Robin and Conversant colleague Katie Mingo join Emma Rose for that conversation, having worked with many leaders and organizations on projects relating to culture and culture change, and the role of leadership in cultivating workplace culture. 

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion has made its way into the priorities and public commitments of countless organizations across the US and globally, with more and more companies creating jobs and initiatives dedicated to the challenge. While this may show up as progress on paper, the reality is that most of those efforts have failed to make a meaningful impact.

As the world continues to learn what works and what doesn’t with regard to DEIJ, Conversant is evolving into its own perspective and approach, which we are calling Inclusive Leadership Design. The word “evolve” is purposeful, as this is an ongoing process that we are engaging our own organization in. For this episode, we invite you into that conversation – what is Inclusive Leadership Design? How can we make DEI efforts more impactful? Who do we need to be, as leaders, to cause the change we want to see?

We are living through a time of massive disruption, and one of the symptoms is what many are calling an “epidemic of burnout.” The term burnout has been used increasingly over the last few years, along with other concerns around stress, overwhelm, and mental health. So much so that 4 in 5 organizations globally have reported that mental health and well-being is a top priority. There are lots of explanations and theories as to why it’s become such a ubiquitous problem, but so far effective solutions seem out of reach.

While cultures of overwork and stress are worth addressing, we also have to look to the role we play as individuals. We are the guardians of our time, energy, presence, and what we choose to contribute. How we design our time impacts not only our performance and well-being but also the patterns of behavior in our organizations. 

Kell Delaney and Katie Mingo join Emma Rose for this episode to talk about what we’ve learned and observed about these trends, and some practical steps we’ve seen work to design more space into work, allowing for increased engagement, productivity, collaboration, creativity, and overall vitality. 

The work of linguists, sociologists, and psychologists reveals just how complex the science of language can be, but to be essential: it matters. It’s a powerful thing that we tend to take for granted. How we speak, what words we choose, and how we listen and interpret are all important parts of human interaction, and no less important at work.

At the heart of truly valuable communication is an awareness of and mutual respect for how we as humans make sense of the world. We have to be able to engage with one another’s stories, listen for what matters and get curious about better understanding another’s world. We have to ask great questions, and give honest answers. That all happens through language, and through presence.

Katie Mingo, Associate Consultant at Conversant, joins Mickey and Emma Rose for this episode about the power (and responsibility) of language. 

We hear from leaders and executives all the time that they want to increase accountability on their teams and across their organizations. Building cultures of accountability sounds like the right strategy for lowered supervision costs and increased efficiency and performance... but what does it mean to build a culture of accountability?

Accountability is deeply tied with trust, and we’ve found through our work and research that most breakdowns in trust come from unmet expectations. There are ways to create an environment where accountability and trust develop with very little resistance, but it takes recognizing that we can’t assume other people understand our unspoken expectations. It’s through conversation that we can most reliably create cultures of accountability.

It’s not uncommon, both at work and in the rest of life, for people to feel like they aren’t being heard. We’ve all experienced that frustration, where you feel like you’ve said something as many times and as many ways as you can think of, and this other person just isn’t getting it. Whether it’s your manager, your direct report, or your spouse, there are plenty of reasons for that kind of disconnect, and while it may feel impossible to get through to them, we think there are some basic principles of conversation and connection worth trying before you give up entirely.

In today’s episode, Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to share what they've learned we can all do to improve the quality of our connections and conversations with others, including making it more likely that others will hear and learn from what we have to say.

Gen Z, which is usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, is expected to make up 27% of the workforce by 2025. And they’re coming into organizations led by people from older generations who already have well-formed biases and expectations about them (including Millennials).

In this episode, we focus on the younger perspective. While Millennials have been represented on this podcast, we wanted to invite in voices that are closer to the Gen Z age range. What motivates them? What expectations do they have for the future? What expectations do they have for leadership, employers, and organizations? Though earlier in their career, the youngest members of our organizations bring a different view of work and the world, one we can get value from if we listen with an intent to learn.

One of the hardest parts of human connection is managing disagreements. It’s easy to assume that a lack of disagreement or argument is proof of a strong and healthy connection, but that isn’t necessarily true. Disagreements are inevitable, at work and in the rest of life, and while it makes perfect sense that we tend to avoid and fear conflict, it can be really valuable.

In today’s episode, Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to share what they consider to be the design of valuable disagreement, along with some practical steps for implementing it.

Alignment is a term that gets thrown around a lot in leadership and org management, but how is alignment different than agreement? We think there’s an important difference, and hosting conversations designed for alignment not only increases value but will reduce disappointments, costs, and pain down the road.

In this episode, Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to talk about this distinction and share what they’ve learned about alignment from years of working with leaders and organizations, including what gets in the way and what kind of leadership behavior makes a difference.

Shownotes: https://bit.ly/3Jy3rIp

Change is a near-constant part of life, leadership, and organizational management today. There are endless books, articles, frameworks, and best practices on the subject, and yet change is still one of the things organizations struggle to manage the most. We’ve found that it isn’t actually enough to simply change. Instead, we think a mindset focused on evolution is more valuable.

So, why evolution rather than change? What’s the difference, and why does it matter? In this episode, Emma Rose is joined by Anne Murray Allen and Krista Spence, both Senior Consultants with experience leading, managing, and studying change. They talk about this distinction and what it means to adopt an evolution mindset.

The Great Resignation is just one of the COVID-era phenomena many people, especially organizational leaders, are concerned with right now. Everyone wants to know—why is this happening? And why don’t we know by now, when it’s been nearly a year since we started noticing the trend? Most of the articles you can read and podcasts you can listen to have tried to analyze what exactly is contributing and what’s to blame. There is a long list of possible explanations that have been given, but no single clear cause.

On this podcast we’re not going to be analyzing the why – you can find plenty of that elsewhere. What we’re most interested in is, how do leaders make decisions in the midst of so much pressure and uncertainty? We have a principle we think is helpful across challenges of all kinds and scales: separating facts from explanations. This is particularly valuable when it’s hard to find anything factual to anchor to and we’re swimming in a sea of explanations. That’s the case for most leaders as they face today’s “war for talent.”

Shownotes: https://bit.ly/3HEpRH3

Community is an important part of building vitality in organizations, or for any group of people that wants to achieve something together. We define vitality as “the capacity to live, grow, or develop; the presence of intellectual and physical vigor; energy.” For organizations, we say that whoever masters vitality as a source of performance has an extraordinary competitive edge and provides a deeply satisfying life for themselves and the people they lead. In this episode, we focus on why community matters and how to build the kind of community that lends to personal and collective vitality.

Link to show notes: https://bit.ly/3kH2YK3

At Conversant, we believe that conversation and connection are underutilized yet critical leverage points for achieving results. Whether it’s meetings, one-on-one check-ins, emails, or chat, studies show that leaders spend the majority of their workdays communicating. What if each of those conversations was truly valuable?

There is a design to conversations that drive value, and we can be students of that design, developing our conversational skills the same way an athlete works to get better at their sport. With practice, this skillset drives more results with less time, money, and stress. That’s why we say “the conversations are the work.” In this episode, we dive into that phrase, sharing why conversation is a worthwhile focus not just for leaders, but for anyone who wants their working and personal relationships to be a source of value and fulfillment rather than waste and stress.

You can find show notes for this episode here: https://bit.ly/3GN3uj3

At Conversant we often say “joy belongs at work.” Not only do we believe work can be joyful, we believe joy belongs at work. These two words, however, feel counter to one another more often than not. How many of us describe our workdays as "joyful"?

Juan Mobili, leadership development consultant, executive coach, and long-time friend of Conversant, has recently reflected on joy in his poetry. Juan joined Robin and Emma Rose to explore this concept of joy a bit more: How is joy different from being happy? What is work without joy? How does joy relate to authentic leadership? How does joy contribute to organizational success?

In this episode we tackle those questions and more, and get to hear some of Juan’s poetry which we hope will inspire similar reflections in all of you.

You can find show notes and learn more about Juan here: https://bit.ly/3na45lT

Should we be remote? In an office? Is hybrid the answer? These questions have been dominating business news and keeping senior leaders up at night for months. There’s no clear answer or one-size-fits-all solution, but we can learn from the leaders that are managing workplace policy decisions today.

This is the unedited version of our interview with Chris Hanslik. The edited episode features clips of our interviews with two other leaders that have also been navigating the office debate challenge. You can find that version by the title, "Leading Through the Great Office Debate: In-Office, Hybrid, or Remote?"

Should we be remote? In an office? Is hybrid the answer? These questions have been dominating business news and keeping senior leaders up at night for months. There’s no clear answer or one-size-fits-all solution, but we can learn from the leaders that are managing workplace policy decisions today.

This is the unedited version of our interview with Kevin Hanes. The edited episode features clips of our interviews with two other leaders that have also been navigating the office debate challenge. You can find that version by the title, "Leading Through the Great Office Debate: In-Office, Hybrid, or Remote?"

Should we be remote? In an office? Is hybrid the answer? These questions have been dominating business news and keeping senior leaders up at night for months. There’s no clear answer or one-size-fits-all solution, but we can learn from the leaders that are managing workplace policy decisions today.

This is the unedited version of our interview with Sté Crispino. The edited episode features clips of our interviews with two other leaders that have also been navigating the office debate challenge. You can find that version by the title, "Leading Through the Great Office Debate: In-Office, Hybrid, or Remote?"

Should we be remote? In an office? Is hybrid the answer? These questions have been dominating business news and keeping senior leaders up at night for months. There’s no clear answer or one-size-fits-all solution, but we can learn from the leaders that are managing workplace policy decisions today.

The latest episode of On Connection features three executives that have led very different approaches to this challenge: Chris Hanslik led an early return to the office for BoyarMiller, a Houston-based law firm. Kevin Hanes has been managing what a hybrid solution looks like for the cybersecurity platform Cybrary. And Sté Crispino leads Tribo, a Sao Paolo-based consulting firm that has always been remote, and she has a few things to say about building a strong culture in a virtual world.

View the show notes for this episode, along with bios for our guests, here: https://bit.ly/3BjKHbR

In our first episode, we focus on why getting a multigenerational perspective on topics relating to work and organizational life matters, and the things we can be smarter together about if we allow each generation to mentor the rest of us in the ways they are uniquely able to contribute. We talk about how growing up in different times gave us different models for leadership and conflict resolution, and the silent biases we might each have about things like being in an office vs. remote work, hierarchical structures and power dynamics, mental health, and more.

Hosted by a Millennial, a Gen-Xer, and a Baby Boomer, On Connection takes on topics relating to organizational life, leadership, and how our quality of connection influences our ability to perform and feel personally fulfilled at work.

While topics around human connection have become more mainstream in the business world in recent years, it’s still a largely underutilized asset in organizations, and yet we know it is a critical leverage point for achieving results. A key part of improving our connections means honoring and valuing difference. We believe differences + trust = brilliance, so along with our generational differences, we will be seeking out various perspectives on topics related to life at work so that we can all be smarter and stronger together.