The Art of Connection

7 Relationship-Building Skills Every Leader Needs Now

Michael J. Gelb

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608684502
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

These days, it's often easier to avoid face-to-face contact in favor of technological shortcuts. But as Michael Gelb argues in this compelling, entertaining book, the meaningful relationships that come from real interaction are the key to creating innovative ideas and solving our most intractable problems. In The Art of Connection, Gelb offers readers seven methods of developing this essential rapport in their professional and personal lives. Each chapter covers specific techniques and illustrates them with memorable stories, relevant scientific research, and hands-on exercises that allow readers to apply their new skills. Most important, Gelb reminds us that developing rapport with others is not just a business tool to enhance productivity but a valuable end in itself. He guides us to cultivate the skills we all need to deepen our relationships, broaden our humanity, and transform our lives.

1

Embrace Humility

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

— ST. AUGUSTINE (354–430), author of The City of God

Even before the advent of the internet, “communication” was the number-one problem identified in surveys of organizational challenges. It’s usually at the top of most lists of personal challenges as well. Let’s begin with a simple exercise that illuminates the problem.

Word-Association Exercise

Please get a piece of blank paper and a pen or use your computer or digital device to make a list numbered 1 to 10. In a moment you’ll get a word to write at the top of the list.

As soon as you’ve written that word, please write the first ten words you think of related to the word at the top. Put down your first ten associations with that top word as quickly as you can, without judging or editing. In a word-association exercise there are no wrong answers.

Ready? The word is: art.

After you complete your ten word associations, consider the associations that might have been written for the same word by one of your peers, your spouse, your best friend, or your boss. How many words would you have in common with that person? Most people are surprised to discover the differences that appear when they compare their results with others’. It’s rare for a group to have much in common at all.

In one group, for example, Jane’s first word was Warhol, the name of her favorite visual artist. Jim’s first association was Garfunkel, a singer whose first name is Art. Dinah wrote martial, as she had just begun studying martial arts, while Roger, an aspiring poet, wrote heart and nine other rhyming words. The group was surprised to discover just how different their associations were.

When a group of accountants did this exercise with similar results, they became very upset. They prided themselves on their uniformity and felt that the diversity of their responses to the word mocked their standardized procedures. In their words, “We’re not artists; we’re accountants.” They insisted that they be given a word that had something to do with their work and that they would then produce greater commonality. When they were given the word money, however, they had even less in common.

Occasionally, people do get one or two words in common, but when you explore the results further and ask them to associate ten words with the shared word, you find that they usually meant something different by the common word after all.

The Paradox Every Leader Needs to Understand

Our associations are unique. Even if we belong to a group classified in some way — accountants, artists, teachers, carpenters, secretaries, doctors, lawyers, or Cajun chefs — each of us is an individual. Each of us, as a result of heredity combined with individual experience, construes the world in our own unique way. We each are gifted with a special ability to experience and express the wonder of being alive. There is no one else like you, no one who can think and create exactly as you do.

This diversity is an important expression of the evolutionary process that helps ensure the survival of the species. Given any type of adverse circumstance that may befall humanity, there is probably someone with the special ability to overcome the challenge.

According to the Population Research Bureau (PRB), approximately 108 billion humans have populated the planet since the advent of the species. Each person who has come and gone was unique, and each of the 7.5 billion people alive today is unique. There’s no one like you in all of human history. The combination of your genetic endowment and the way that genetic material is influenced by your life experience results in a one-of-a-kind phenomenon.

And yet, in so many ways, we are all the same. Our basic human needs — for air, food, shelter, security, esteem, love, and so on — are universal. Everyone, everywhere, in every culture wants respect. Leadership is the art of skillfully meeting universal human needs, including the need to be appreciated for being unique and the need for a sense of belongingness and connection.

UNIQUENESS AND BELONGINGNESS

Jeanine Prime and Elizabeth Salib, of the Catalyst Research Center for Advancing Leader Effectiveness, highlight an important paradox: “Our research was also able to isolate the combination of two separate, underlying sentiments that make employees feel included: uniqueness and belongingness. Employees feel unique when they are recognized for the distinct talents and skills they bring to their teams; they feel they belong when they share important commonalities with coworkers.”

Prime and Salib add: “It’s tricky for leaders to get this balance right, and emphasizing uniqueness too much can diminish employees’ sense of belonging. However, we found that altruism is one of the key attributes of leaders who can coax this balance out of their employees, almost across the board.”

An Art of Infinite Possibility

Our associations are unique, and they are potentially unlimited. Our minds are capable of linking any thought with any other thought. If you doubt this, try to find a word that cannot be linked to the word art. No matter how hard you search for an unrelatable word, you’ll discover that your mind can connect anything to anything else.

The exercise of finding unrelatable words is particularly fun when framed as a competition. For example, when a group of biochemists were challenged to think of a word that “could not, in any way, be related to art,” one clever PhD suggested that antidisestablishmentarianism couldn’t be linked to art. But another erudite member of the group pointed out that the word means “opposition to the disestablishment of orthodox churches,” which opposed, among other things, the practice of many popular arts. Someone else mentioned that the word antidisestablishmentarianism actually contains the letters of the word for art. Another person explained that you can automatically connect this or any other strange word with art as a member of that class of words you don’t normally associate with art.

Your mind can connect anything with anything else and can make a potentially infinite number of connections with any word you hear or read, but your way of associating, of making connections, is unique. This is good news if you are interested in creative thinking. If every individual has the capacity to generate unlimited associations, and each person has a unique way of doing it, then every group possesses vast potential for ideation.

When it comes to the art of connection, however, the implications are daunting, as the potential for misunderstanding in any communication is also unlimited. My mind is capable of making an unlimited number of associations with every single word that you say, and if your way of saying things and my way of hearing things is unique to each of us, it begins to seem amazing that we can communicate at all.

When we depend on words primarily, misunderstanding is to be expected. One reason that relationships seem to be degrading is that many people rely increasingly on text and email as their means of relating with others. But emoticons do not serve as effective substitutes for the body language, voice tonality, and eye contact that help us understand the context and meaning of words.

Even with the benefit of context, misunderstanding is pandemic. How many times have you had the experience of carefully explaining something to someone, watching him nod in apparent understanding, and seeing him do something entirely different from what you thought you’d agreed upon?

The Telephone Game

Much of our communication is reminiscent of the children’s game Telephone, which was a popular party activity when I was a child. I didn’t imagine then that I would employ it with groups of corporate executives many years later and that it would be a hilarious and memorable team-building activity that also illuminates a fundamental difficulty in communication.

The game works best with a group of eight or more people. It begins when the facilitator whispers a phrase into the ear of the first player, who then turns and whispers it into the ear of the next person, and so on. (The whisper should be soft enough so that only the intended recipient can hear the message.) After the message goes around, the last person to receive it states the message aloud. Invariably, the original phrase goes through so much distortion in the process of sharing that the final product is not only different from the original, but often hilariously so.

For example, in a recent session, a group of twelve bankers managed to turn “Robots randomly write regulatory rulebooks” into “Blue bots rewrite regular glory books on domes.” The game is amusing and highlights the extent to which our communication is subject to radical misunderstanding.

THE ILLUSION OF TRANSPARENCY

If you tapped out a familiar song like “Happy Birthday” or the national anthem on a table or even directly on a friend’s arm, how likely do you think it is that your friend can guess the tune you are tapping? In a dissertation entitled “Overconfi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Wheels Up
• Introduction: The Secret of Health, Happiness, and Leadership
• 1. Embrace Humility
• 2. Be a Glowworm
• 3. Achieve the Three Liberations
• 4. Transcend Fixations
• 5. Balance Energy Exchange
• 6. Be a RARE Listener
• 7. Turn Friction into Momentum
• Epilogue: Wheels Down
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Recommended Reading and Resources
• Index
• About the Author