Sorry this is late. A travel day got in the way of my standard posting schedule. Assuming you like what follows, figure I made your Tuesday slightly worse but I incrementally improved your Wednesday.
– Bob
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So I was thinkin’ — a process my incipient grandparenthood triggered.
An epoch ago, more or less, I was the grandkid. We lived in Highland Park, Illinois. My grandparents, along with the occasional aunt or uncle, lived in Chicago. I had, as you might imagine, a non-virtual relationship with all of them.
That was the American norm back then. The parallels to today’s white-collar workforce are, I trust, obvious.
Back in my childhood years, people who worked together worked together physically, not just logically. As the workforce has become hybridized (no, not genetically, and shame on you for thinking that way!), our workplace interactions are becoming increasingly transactional and decreasingly based on relationships. Our colleagues are becoming more digital avatars than multidimensional human beings.
Nor is there just one, digital, driving force behind this. Before digital strategies claimed our attention, medium-size and larger organizations had … well, improvised isn’t too strong a word … how to manage branch-office relationships for a very long while.
Instituting the organization’s business culture while establishing the levels of trust and alignment needed for effective collaboration wasn’t easy even when everyone was expected to show up for work in their assigned cubicles at their assigned locations and schedules, when those cubicles weren’t located at corporate headquarters.
As my grandparenthood inexorably approaches I’m wrestling with an envisioned future in which the soon-to-arrive next-generation member of my family and I will be more digital entities to each other than flesh-and-blood human beings.
It’s parallel: Colleagues might not be family members the way offspring and offsprings’ offspring are, but their relationship dynamics have commonalities worth paying attention to.
For example: From what I’ve heard, read about, and experienced, managers of hybrid workforces who schedule regular one-on-one catch-up conversations with those they’re paid to lead … and who keep to that schedule … are in the minority.
This is ridiculous. For managers of in-person workforces, regular one-on-one meetings are routine, and for good reason: If trust and alignment are essential for effective team functioning, they can only be more so for managers and their direct reports to work together effectively.
So if trust and alignment are essential aspects of effective leadership, frequent one-on-one contact is a prerequisite.
A prerequisite, not a complete solution. Because as all of us recognize who have maintained business relationships via web conferencing tools, these tools are more useful for maintaining relationships than for building them from scratch.
It’s right about here that the grandparental parallels do break down, or had better break down: the bond between familial infants and adults is built far more on physical contact than the relationship between leaders and those they lead.
And so, I’m left to wonder how well a mostly digital relationship will go when getting to know my newest relative.
Bob’s last word: Please, please, please! Don’t start to explore how robot care givers might fit into the challenge. We can imagine technology that gives mechanical nannies and their charges animations of their physical-world faces and so on. I supposed it might work. But the potential for traumatization strikes me as far greater than for better relationship-building.
As a fellow former Chicagoan, I see your observations as the result of the counter-insurgency to the culture wars mostly won by us Boomers in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
One result of this counter-insurgency is an attempted change of the guard rails from team to tribe.
Tools, from a stick to the internet, are dumb, dumb as a doorknob, as the saying goes. If we don’t use these tools to meet our human needs and those of the culture we seek to live in, then “team” and “synergy” will become foreign concepts to businesses, and they will be poorer for it.
A culture of nihilism serves no legitimate business.
Perhaps, you should consider lecturing Gen Z on the very serious reasons we fought those cultural wars in the first place.
Whatever else, I’m pretty sure “lecturing” members of any generation won’t get us very far. As my Gen something-or-other daughter explained to me once, rather testily, giving unsolicited advice is a terrific way to trigger conflict. (In case you’re wondering, I did point out that people pay me for my advice, so I’d have thought she’d appreciate my giving her my advice for free. It didn’t help.)
“For managers of in-person workforces, regular one-on-one meetings are routine…”
This used to be true, through my prior job at least. Now managers are having Team meetings daily in my organization. It was the “solution” to managing while people were working remotely during COVID, and no one thought to stop it afterward. We used to have a one hour weekly team meeting in a conference room and catch up with each other, as well as pass information back and forth with our manager. Now we spend 15-35 minutes telling him what we’re doing and then he’s off to the next team’s meeting (late if we take 35 minutes).
I think I’ve had three one-on-one meetings with my supervisor since COVID started, during what are supposed to be quarterly events. The quarterly events supplanted annual appraisals because the managers were supposed to give us time for lower-stress meetings more often. I don’t know where HR thinks our managers are going to make more time for us, given that all managers in my organization already spend six to seven hours in meetings every single day.
Maybe someone should suggest replacing meetings with email, occasionally?
Congratulations, Bob.
Thanks!