Team Anywhere Leadership Podcast

You can actually create stronger levels of engagement in online meetings than you can in in-person meetings. How can you do that? Well, one of the biggest keys has to do with intentional design. The reason why you can create stronger levels of engagement comes down to your ability to break people into their own breakout rooms instantaneously, much faster than what would occur in person, and create space for a quieter more personal space for people to connect with each other (and introverts love that).

This week, we’re releasing part two of our 2-Part episode on Engaging Virtual Meetings. In this series, we speak with virtual meeting expert, John Chen to learn tips on how to plan engaging virtual meetings. Inside this second episode you’ll learn tips for designing your virtual meetings with tips on what to do before, during and after the meeting, how to get people to show up to meetings on time, and how to tell if they’re really engaged in the first place. 

How to tell if you’re engaging people in their meeting? 

Winning teams will talk all the time. Losing teams will stop talking and give up on each other.

How to get people to show up to Zoom Meetings on time

If you wait for everyone else to show up, the impression you’re giving the attendees is “I’ll always wait for you.” The next time your meeting time begins, jump right into business whether everyone is there or not. The people who are late will have to catch up and, most likely, they’ll only be late for a meeting once. If you stick with this approach, you show the one person who shows up on time is that you respect their time, especially your online time. 

Virtual Meeting Ideas

Schedule one hour every two weeks just for fun and connection
Spend time during this meeting specifically to learn something about your team member that you may not know.

 Have a Window for Discussion Before & After the Actual Meeting
Open up your meetings before they begin. Give time for your participants to connect with each other on different issues that won’t be conducted during the meeting. After meetings, allow people to have conversations with each other.

Meeting Introduction

●      Play Music

●      Have a fun/interesting Zoom Background

●      Acknowledge every person who logs into the meeting.

Virtual Meeting Icebreakers

The best virtual meeting icebreakers accomplish two things, they create fun and clarify expectations.

Create Fun: Dedicate 3-5 minutes at the beginning of the virtual meeting to doing something fun. 

Clarify Expectations: One virtual meeting icebreaker you can do is have everyone take turns sharing their name, role, location, and one thing they’re expecting from this meeting or one thing they’ve achieved from the last meeting. This is a great way to start the meeting and to get everyone to start by opening up and engaging. 

Virtual PowerPoint Karaoke

One great example of a virtual meeting icebreaker is virtual PowerPoint Karaoke. 

Instructions: Put People into teams, have them present a slide deck they’ve never seen before. (Take something that’s a skill that your team members need and make it fun.) Have one team present at the beginning of each meeting. 

Have the presenters follow two rules for the presentation:

Rule #1: Focus on your transition (Perhaps the slides have things that definitely don’t connect).

Rule #2: Say Yes and to every response and question you get on the presentation. 

Read Blog for More info.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Remote teams around the globe have been under one giant cloud zoom fatigue since last March. Remote leaders must face the fact that it’s been almost a year since they’ve been leading virtual meetings, and to get real with really asking themselves if they are creating engaging virtual meetings. 

This week, we’re releasing part one of our 2-Part episode on Engaging Virtual Meetings. In this series, we speak with virtual meeting expert, John Chen to learn tips on how to plan engaging virtual meetings. Inside this first episode, you’ll learn best practices for designing your virtual meetings and understand the role that Psychological Safety has inside your virtual meetings. 

What is an engaging virtual meeting?
Before we reveal how to create an engaging virtual meeting, let’s define how to create a non- engaging virtual meeting. In boring meetings, the leader puts up slides and talks (in monotone) for an entire hour while the team takes a nap or scrolls on social media. To make sure no person is engaged at the meeting, just copy your in-person meeting into an online format and make sure that none of your participant's comment, talk, react, or ask questions. If you don’t want audience engagement, then send a video.  

Engaging Virtual Meeting Best Practices

Connection Before Content
Creating engaging virtual meetings is about keeping and retaining an emotional and intellectual connection with each participant from the beginning to the end of the meeting. Connect with each participant before they dive into the content. Take time for virtual meeting ice breakers. Show the participants that you value the relationships everyone has with each other. Keep that level of personal connection throughout the meeting. In engaging virtual meetings, people connect, engage, and have fun.

Create a Safe & Interactive Virtual Meeting Environment
Establishing good psychological safety in virtual meetings is the most important thing leaders should focus on to engage their teams in virtual meetings. Psychological safety in a virtual meeting is when all participants feel safe in front of the group and contribute, interact and chat. One of the reasons you might not have very interactive online meetings is that you haven’t intentionally created a safe space for interaction, contribution, and engagement.

3 Steps to Create Virtual Psychological Safety
 To establish virtual psychological safety, leaders need to go first, be inviting, and allow for awkward silence. 

Let’s look at those in more detail:

Go First

Leaders need to go first and lead through vulnerability. One example of displaying this is to share when you’ve failed recently. This type of authenticity and vulnerability allows your team to feel more comfortable sharing about when they’ve failed recently and helps create a learning culture. Going first also helps bridge the gap between you and your team to create stronger connection and deeper trust required to accomplish big goals. So, don’t be afraid to go first and display a unique trait or characteristic that you’d like to encourage others on your team to display. 

Be Inviting 

To establish strong virtual psychological safety, recognize everyone’s presence when they login to the meetings. By simply acknowledging their presence and being inviting, you can help create a space that makes them more comfortable to share and engage freely and more comfortably without the fear of judgment. 

Allow for Awkward Silence 

Lastly, in order to establish strong virtual psychological safety, allow for awkward silence. Don’t call out on people when you ask questions, give them time to think about their answers, and allow them to answer when they want to answer. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do teams maximize productivity while in a virtual environment?  Actually, we have never been set up to be more productive.

Today we speak to Jeremy Redleaf, the founder of Caveday, a social community where people unite globally to get focus work done. 

I went into "the cave" a couple of times over the last few weeks and got more done in three hours than I typically get done in a week.  

Jeremy Redleaf is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and ginger.  He is the head honcho at Brackets Creative, a co-founder of cave day, and the founder of Odd Job Nation.  He makes films experiences and companies in service of making people feel more alive.

One day Jeremy was struggling with a writing project.  He found that he was never writing long enough.  He blurted out that he needed a “cave day.”  He made up some rules and went off the grid for a whole day by himself.  With two collaborators, Jake Kahana and Molly Sonsteng, they created the social format, Caveday.  

Caveday is the world’s most focused community where entrepreneurs, artists, creators, business owners, teams, and employees commit to focusing on their projects for one, two, or three hours at a time. 

To get people to focus together requires particularly aggressive facilitation.  It requires a group dynamic, where someone’s empowered to say, we’re going to do this thing now!  Jeremy suggests that team members facilitate their own caves by designating someone as the facilitator and doing the following:

(1)  Set an amount of time for everyone to focus on singular work

(2)  Share with the team what you will work on

(3)  Check-in at the end to hold people accountable

On Caveday, teams have achieved great success together, individuals have written Oscar-winning screenplays, books, poetry, and made incredible progress on their projects.

Incredible freedom to do what is really important in your life comes from the discipline of setting aside a few hours to do deep work.  

Why is it so hard to focus?

“Our brains are wired to avoid existential challenges. So, if I'm writing the next great novel, when I don't know the answer, my brain goes, Danger, danger, escape, escape!  By creating the Caveday environment, we're all in this together.  We prompt people to share some of the vulnerability what's going, what's going on for them, as they do their work, we're allowing people to co-regulate and stay out of that danger zone, stay out of that hypo arousal or hyperarousal, those states that get us out of our ability to function and tackle the work we need to do.”

The ability to have the corner office, to have a place to truly focus, has been reserved for top management.  Now that we are remote, we have given the gift of focus to many layers down in the organization.  

Keys to working in a remote environment are:

1.    Share when you are on and off the grid

2.    Share how you work

3.    Share what your life is like

4.    Share when you do your best work

5.    Share how you expect people to escalate an emergency

 Visit blog for Additional Quick Tips.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wayne Tarken and Stephen Hart are agile practitioners, seasoned educators and experts on building agile HR organizations to transform workplaces.  They focus on the application of Agile as a means to manage complex problems that HR leaders face and gain traction in their implementation.

The following are their recommendations for succeeding as a leader in today’s world facing a pandemic.

Use Agile as a way to enhance your team’s performance:

PwC found that projects that use agile practices are 30% more successful.  

With everyone remote, break down meetings into parts:

Each meeting should be based on 15 minute sessions. 

Ask 3 questions to quickly identify and remove roadblocks.

1. What did you say you would do yesterday?
2. What didn’t you do today?
3. What got in your way?

Make Empathy your Big Business: (post #2)

Caring deeply for your employees is part and parcel of managing.

Start your meeting with asking “How are people feeling right now?”

Ask, “How are you coping?” “How are things at home?” “How are you able to balance your responsibilities?” “Do you have the tools that you need to succeed?”

Then get down to “business.”

Create a sense of belonging:

Bring back normalcy and connection.

Show how important people are and honor their contributions.

Order pizzas and send them to everyone’s home and have a business lunch!

Be transparent:

A CEO is not supposed to have all the answers, especially in a crisis.  Share with your people that you don’t know everything.  This transparency builds trust.

Be compassionate:

In a time of turmoil, your goal is to create a company where people are compassionate with themselves and with each other.  The more you are compassionate with your people, the more they are compassionate with you.

Be flexible around schedules.  Allow people a degree of freedom in when and how they get their work done.

Shorten your time frame:

Plan out the next 3 months, not the next 3 years.

Break objectives into bite size pieces.

Then review and plan again every three months.

About Steve Hart 

Steve Hart is an executive coach with The Professional Development Group, LLC, coaching inspiring leaders,  developing high-performing teams and creating great places to work. . Hart earned a MS in  organizational dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of the University of Durham in  England, LaSalle University and the Stonier Graduate School of Banking. Learn more about him here. 

About Wayne Tarken, SPHR, CSM 

With more than 20 years of experience working with business executives, Wayne Tarken is well versed  professionally and personally to help others in the implementation of agile and strategic leadership practices  that improve the performance of business strategies and operations A co-author of the book,  “Black Holes and White Spaces: Reimagining the Future of Work and HR,” he has developed leading-edge  thinking about the emerging roles and capabilities of leaders. Tarken graduated from Temple University with  an MBA in management and a BA in economics. Learn more about him here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Be More Transparent 

• Share transparent financial information
  • If your business is hurting for money and you’re considering a new contract that’s not your ideal client, get your team’s input on it. Do they want to work with a not-so-perfect client? Or would they want to lose their hours? What’s the Trade off?
  • Be transparent when a client cuts part of a contract, with the cost of a new contract and most importantly the expenses that go with that contract and allow your team to budget their own projects. 
• Be Transparent in Daily Stand Up Meetings
  • Share what you as the leader- or CEO- plan on doing that day, ask what others are planning on doing,
  • Share big wins
  • Require video on calls to increase connection to each other. 

Leverage The Power of Story

Your Team’s individual stories are important to building relationships with your clients. Also, your company's stories are important to building relationships with your clients. You can leverage the connection between you and your clients by using stories.

Early in the pandemic, Trevor had his team film their own film crew showing how they were working safely. This made a huge difference for his clients to choose to continue to work with them, it gave them visible information that created the trust needed for them to continue to work with them. Some people are still fearful of leaving their houses right now, whether they are living with someone who is high risk, or they are high risk themselves. It’s important for you as the leader and for your team, to share with your customers how you are operating in a way that limits the chance of exposure. 

To do this, create two videos:

VIDEO #1 COVID Safety Video

• How your company works safely now with precautions in place.The benefit of this video is that it expresses to your client the importance of safety. It shows that safety is your number one priority and visibly shows how you can still operate your service with proper measures in place.

VIDEO #2 Employee Story Video 

• A short story video for you and each of your team members to use on your email signature. Share two or three facts about yourself that you would like your customers to know about you. 
• The benefits of this video are
  • It helps your clients learn about you on a personal level. When they’re getting to know you on a personal level, they become more understanding when mistakes occur because they see you as a human rather than just your position. They see you beyond being a vendor or your position in the company.
  • It sets you apart from your competition because now you stand out in a crowd of other companies that don’t share about the stories behind their employees. When considering you as a client, you will be the one they remember and choose. 

Make Your Client Your Friend 

1. Keep a Monthly Communication Plan with Your Clients-And Past Clients

Use these phone calls for specifically getting to know them. 

Your clients should be your friends. Friendship is a valuable element in keeping current clients, re-connecting with past clients, and getting new clients.

Critically Consider Your Client Base 

1. Listen really well in the first phone call with your new potential client.
2. Ask Your Team what kind of clients they want to work with and if they have fun working with the clients. In Trevor’s story with his wedding clients, it felt like they were growing, when the impact was that his team wasn’t happy filming the wedding videos. 

Links:

https://www.corporatefilming.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are unique challenges leaders face as they lead a hybrid team. Leaders today need to be more authentic, more empathetic, and much more real. Now is the time to demonstrate the authenticity that our team members have always wanted at work, and remember that bringing your authentic self to work is good for business.

Have you seen the same resilience in the workforce in reaction to COVID that you’ve seen in children as they adapt?

The workforce has shown tremendous resilience. The managers who are regularly checking in, offering support and encouragement to their staff, seeing how they’re coping are doing well in building resilience on their teams. These leaders are embracing this new normal, which is anything but normal, and understand that things are going to be different. 

The leaders who are struggling now seem to be the ones who struggled before the pandemic. They are the ones who didn’t have relationships with their employees, hadn’t built trust and misperceived their team members as robots. 

Lead A Hybrid Team By

Focusing on Inclusion - 

Make sure everyone is on the same playing field. Not everyone is ready to go back to the office right now. Even though you have some people in the office, and even though we all recognize the value of face-to-face communication, we still need to be having Zoom meetings so that one person isn’t left behind. We’re all on the same playing field when we do this. You need to make sure everyone is on the same playing field. 

Discover Your Unconscious Biases

Remote employees will exacerbate your own baggage and biases about particular employees. Who you think is your star player you could tend to give them the benefit of the doubt more often than your average player. You need to make sure that you are constantly asking yourself, are there people on your team that you have not given a fair share to? And what would that look like if you did? Ensure that you are not just reinforcing your own biases and predispositions about particular employees. These biases are now diving into who’s remote and who is staying home? You must be aware around all places. 

Offering Support 

It’s kind of like parenting, each child needs something different, and it's an ebb and flow. There are some children that are just going to be needier no matter what. As the leader, it’s about you being fair and giving the benefit of the doubt to some employees versus other employees. Leaders need to remember the social issues, particularly minorities and let them know that you are there for them and that you get it. 

To offer support to your team right now:

Check-in Regularly

Leaders should be seeing changes in people and being in tune with them. Make sure they know that you’re thinking about them and that you get it. Leaders need to look for signs of burnout. Are you noticing employees who are acting differently? Are you giving them time to talk about their personal life? Are they now quick to anger when before they were calm and composed? Are they now quiet when they use to be very outgoing? 

Be More Authentic

Bringing your authentic self to work is good business. Know your employees as humans not as robots. Younger leaders are really thriving because they’ve been able to bring in this authenticity that they’ve always wanted to bring into work. We spend a lot of time at work, and to have to feel like you need to be someone else is hard, it gets old and it's uncomfortable. If you’re not authentic, you're not able to do your best work. 

Now this begs the question, who are you? Who is your whole self? It’s requiring reflection from many leaders and workers and some are struggling with it more than others. We have to redefine ourselves. 

Find Rebecca on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-m-knight-3667a94/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What can I do as a leader to create a social bond with my team while working remotely? 

Proximity (real or perceived) is one of the most important determinants of relationships.  Creating those bonds across remote distances includes getting people together to work on tasks together, and this is typically more impactful than classic ‘team building’ or socializing.

Whether remote or in person, leaders can help provide that sense of purpose to create those bonds. What’s the big picture? How does my work connect and matter? In what ways do I contribute to others–to the community?

What do you think this pandemic has done in terms of innovation?

The most important innovations don’t come along when you’re doing things like you always did them. The most important innovations come from the greatest barriers, when you just can’t do things the same thing the same way anymore. you’re forced to think really differently. That’s where the pandemic has sparked innovation. 

How can we be raising the energy of our team working remotely? 

Spend time talking and connecting before diving into the task elements of meetings. Celebrate the differences between team members. Hold your team members accountable, and make sure they know their work matters to the organization. team. Provide recognition. 

How is trust different when working remotely? 

When we have online meetings, we can’t see nonverbals as well. As leaders, we must focus on the fact that we need to be as easy to read as possible. People don’t trust what they don’t understand. An element that builds trust is a great sense of openness. People don’t trust what they don’t understand. And so when we see each other a lot, we tend to build familiarity and familiarity breeds acceptance. 

What are the opportunities we have with remote teams?

Teams are bonding in new ways.  We have new levels of intimacy (professionally of course) based on seeing parts of our colleagues’ lives that we wouldn’t see in a typical work setting. We have the opportunity to bring these new bonds forward, having survived these hard times together. 

Going into 2021 What Conversations Should Leaders Be Having?

How might we use this pandemic as a positive trigger? How might we accelerate our progress? Where do we go from here? What are the things that we wanted to do anyway–but can now pursue even more enthusiastically?

About Tracy Brower

Dr. Tracy Brower is a PhD sociologist and a principal with Steelcase’s Applied Research + Consulting group. Tracy studies the sociology of work and the changing nature of work, workers and workplace. She is the author of a new book, The Secrets to Happiness at Work, and also her previous book Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work: A Guide for Leaders and Organizations . In addition, she is a contributor to Forbes.com and Fast Company. Tracy is an award-winning speaker and has over 25 years of experience working with global clients to achieve business results.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we speak to Tara Rethore, CEO and Strategic Advisor at Strategy for Real on how to create a remote team strategy. First, she explains how to utilize the mindset of taking a company on an adventure in a strategy retreat. Then, she describes the keys to preparing for and leading a successful remote strategy offsite and a secret high tech tool that she uses to keep her teams engaged.

As a result, her mantra, which I think we all need to adopt, is to Be Open to Ambiguity…something we all need in these times.

Because of the changes in work we’ve experienced this year, the strategic planning process is different on a remote team. In-person Strategic thinking benefits from the energy in face-to-face interactions. In fact, leaders have to avoid the mistake of copying and pasting the strategic planning process that they do in person and think it’s going to be successful online. Given that, in-person strategic planning won’t achieve the same results on a Zoom call. For one reason, it’s because it’s harder to read the room on a video call. Another reason is that video calls are extremely exhausting compared to in-person meetings where the strategic planning process balances the exhaustion with building energy. 

Strategic Planning Process:

Leaders have to look at how to plan with a strategic planning mindset and consider the balance of what needs to happen in person, what can happen online, and when to have breakout rooms and personal work. The strategic planning process is really an art now with so many dynamics to consider. Tera says it’s especially important to look at the whole, plot it back, and get the right people in the room.

Strategic Planning is An Adventure

1. First, you must think of planning for your strategic plans as a production. 
2. Second, how do you engage the members?
3. Next, what are the different steps along the way?
4. Finally, make sure you have a backup plan, in case you are confronted by a wild beast. Be flexible and able to pivot, switch or move, consider calling it early, or regrouping when needed.

Effective Strategic Planning Works through the Five W’s

WHY-  Identify the End Result

In order to plan the most effective strategic planning session, start with why. Why are you having this retreat? What does a successful retreat look like? What are you trying to achieve? What do you need to resolve to be successful? Who or What might get in the way? What would it take for them to say yes to this? What would it take for this day to be successful? 

Who

Who are the key players in this process? What is their most important part?

What

When creating a remote team strategy, leaders must ask, "what is the outcome we are trying to achieve?"

• What can you be doing to save the conversation in advance? Don’t focus on sharing information but on processing that information and defining clear outcomes. 
• During the strategy retreat, what tools will you be using? 
  • Flip charts during in-person meetings - encouraging people to write their own notes- on paper, and share them on the screen, take pictures of what they’ve written, get a picture of what’s going on in the room 

When 

Keep it simple: 2-Day Intensive Retreats need to be broken down and simultaneously energizing. 

Continued here.

Strategy for Real

Linked In

Lizard Brain Solutions, Brian Tarallo

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With over 15 years’ experience in Human Resource Management and the Wellness Industry Elysia has combined her expertise to partner with businesses to help develop strategies to attract, engage and retain employees. Working within multiple sectors Elysia helps promote a healthy workforce that supports business needs and enhances productivity and engagement.

Workplace Wellness Defined
Workplace wellness can mean different things to different people. To Elysia, workplace wellness means both the employee and the employer collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of the employees.

Workplace wellness goes beyond the context of our physical and mental wellness, it spans across eight dimensions that Elysia focuses on with organizations. Wellness today requires taking a strategic approach that goes beyond educating employees. 

Dimensions of Wellness

1. Spiritual Wellness - Shared Purpose.  Shared Commitment to something greater than yourself.
2. Intellectual Wellness - Shared Knowing.  Employees know what is expected and know how to manage their workload.  This requires consistent and repetitive communication – what is happening & how to handle what is happening.
3. Occupational Wellness - Shared Sense of Job Security.  Employees know that everything will be fine.  Employees agree on expectations and know they can deliver in spite of everything else going on around them.
4. Environmental Wellness - Shared ability to work from anywhere.  Managers are cognizant of everyone’s individual circumstances – and can support each employee in his/her individual workspace need.
5. Social Wellness - Shared Interactions.  Maintaining connections.  Social events, social “gatherings.”
6. Financial Wellness - Shared Financial Abilities.  Addressing financial stress.   Financial support for those struggling. 
7. Physical Wellness- Shared physical health.  Making sure employees are taking care of their bodies through healthy food and exercise, taking breaks, sleeping properly.
8. Emotional Wellness - Shared Emotional Well-Being.  Supporting mental and emotional states of anxiety, worry, stress through strengthening resilience.  

How to Build an Effective Wellness Program

• Program is Created by Employees
• Program is Part of the Culture
• Program Is Continual

Tips for Increasing Employee Wellness

• Setting Boundaries
• Journaling
• Providing Caregiver’s Leave
• Counseling

CPL Company
Elysia on LinkedIn

Workplace Wellness Resources
Workplace Wellness: Time to get Strategic
Reimagining Wellness in a Post-COVID World

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike Robbins is the author of five books, including his brand new title, WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging.  For the past 20 years, he’s been a sought-after speaker and consultant who delivers keynotes and seminars for some of the top organizations in the world. 

His clients include Google, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Genentech, eBay, Harvard University, Gap, LinkedIn, the Oakland A’s, and many others.  

He and his work have been featured in the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review, as well as on NPR and ABC News.  He’s a regular contributor to Forbes, hosts his own podcast (called We’re All in This Together), and his books have been translated into 15 different languages.

How did the book, “We’re All in This Together” come to fruition?

Within weeks of releasing his recent book, Bring Your Whole Self to Work, Mike got an urgent feeling to write a new book. Despite the feedback encouraging him to not write a book (due to the time-commitment), Mike pushed to write his new book. Within three weeks of his book release, he began writing  We’re all in this together, which was released just before the pandemic hit. 

THE MESSAGE FOR LEADERS
With his book released this year, Mike’s message to leaders anywhere is that when you are getting a message, a gut feeling, an intuition, you should listen to it. It’s telling you something for a reason and we don’t always listen to it like we should.

Embracing Authenticity

As an audible learner and extrovert, the podcast process has helped Mike manage his own mental and emotional being. He’s noticed the more personal he gets, the more universally he connects with people. Because of this, he doesn’t shy away from asking the questions on his mind that seem vulnerable at first.  

THE MESSAGE FOR LEADERS:

 THE MORE PERSONAL, THE MORE UNIVERSAL. Leaders need to embrace the fear of sharing what’s really on their mind, because it’s likely on someone else’s mind.. 

Leadership Changes Since the Pandemic:

There’s this paradox leaders are experiencing through the pandemic which is that physically, we are more disconnected with each other than we’ve ever been. Yet, at the same time, we’re seeing inside each other’s lives on our video calls. We’re seeing parts of each other's lives that we typically don’t see in the office. (The inside of people’s, houses, their pets, their kids). There’s a level of vulnerability these video calls are actually creating which is allowing for leaders to connect with their team. 

Mike mentioned, “what if we went through this pandemic in the 70’s?” It’s really extraordinary the things we can do and the way we can do them right now. One perspective change in having video calls is that we can be thankful first that we have jobs where we can be at home and continue to work, and second that we have this amazing technology that is allowing us to do that as we make it through this pandemic. 

Loneliness

Mike says he’s not someone who “presents” as a lonely person. So when he would experience it, he would deny that emotion. Happy, positive people feel lonely. If we deny or mute one emotion, we mute all of our emotions. “You can’t just turn off one emotion.” During this pandemic, he’s been focusing on allowing himself to feel vulnerable. Feelings are meant to be felt, whether we like them or not. 

https://mike-robbins.com/together/

https://mike-robbins.com/virtual-digital-programs/

https://mike-robbins.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.