Be Here Now
I’ve been feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In the movie, Murray, a television weatherman, is sent to watch Punxsutawney Phil emerge from his burrow and predict how much more winter remains. Murray relives the day over and over and over again, each time with hilarious results.
In my movie however, the results are not hilarious.
The settings are the many meetings I’ve had with business owners and other leaders of companies and organizations interested in having me guide them through an EOS implementation. EOS is a very specific operating system for running your company that involves the entire leadership team working together through all- day planning sessions.
The Groundhog Day issue? I keep getting asked if it’s okay to have remote leadership team members participate in the sessions through video conferencing. Of course, as technology keeps improving, more and more companies operate with leadership teams that include remote members, so this issue comes up over and over again.
I understand the issues of time and cost associated with assembling a geographically dispersed team in one place for the meetings, but the value of doing this far outweighs them. It’s always an interesting exercise explaining this, particularly to younger leadership team members who believe everything can be done remotely just as efficiently as face-to-face. Here is how I make my case, (over and over), that this simply isn’t true.
The most effective leadership teams are based on their ability to trust the other members without reservation. As Patrick Lencioni has described in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, trust leads to an ability to have useful conflict – unfiltered and passionate debate about issues. This leads to commitment, which leads to accountability, which leads to better results.
Trust is the backbone of high performing leadership teams.
And trust can be built to the highest levels only when people are physically present with each other. This is due to the hardwiring of the human brain.
According to Valérie Berset-Price, founder and president of Professional Passport, “Building trust is a multisensory experience. Only when people are physically present together can they use all their senses to establish needed trust.”
Technology has a long way to go to create the full multisensory experience of face-to-face meetings. The multisensory experience includes the subtle smells, facial movements, and tonal qualities that you don’t consciously notice and that escape the cameras but that the brain registers continually in face-to-face encounters. It includes the physical contact of randomly brushing against each other, the handshakes and slaps on the back, and the myriad of other movements and subtle interactions that happen off camera.
The most important aspect of meeting together however, is that it leads to eating together and sharing time during meeting breaks and when the official workday is done. Which leads to casual conversation about family and friends, vacations and hobbies. This gives team members a chance to get past issues of differing upbringing, histories, and accents as well as varying religions and cultural mores.
Meeting together gives team members time to bond and see the humanity in each other. They become real people with lives outside of their office role, people with the same love of their families and hopes for the future.
All of which leads to more trusting team members better able to work together no matter the issues they face or the situations they have to overcome.
My movie usually ends with me successfully bringing the leadership team together in one place. Together we share in the camaraderie of a day of hard work followed by a nice dinner and convivial conversation about family and friends. The committed and energized leadership team then moves on to implement their new skills and build the successful future they envision.
As for me, I’m off to the next skeptic, prepared to plead my case for building an exceptionally trustful team through face-to-face contact.