A short spoken presentation by Simon Sinek about how trust in organizations mirrors personal trust and how the COVID-driven shift to remote work made building trust harder. He argues that the informal 'between the meetings' interactions are essential for trust and offers practical, intentional practices to recreate those moments virtually (e.g., non-work Monday huddles, virtual co-working, phone calls).
So trust in a company is not that dissimilar from trust in our personal relationships and friendships. You know, it's a human experience. It's a feeling.
And as we've all experienced during COVID it's more difficult to build trust virtually. It's not impossible, but it requires a lot more work and a lot more intention. You know, Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said, music is what happens between the notes. Well, trust is what happens between the meetings. Right? It's the conversation walking into the meeting and the conversation walking out of the meeting. It's the bumping into somebody in the hallway and being like, oh, I meant to tell you. It's the, hey, you want to grab a coffee? That over the course of time, those little moments of truth, those little innocuous experiences that by themselves count from zero, but over time, they start to build relationship and they start to build trust. The hard thing in a virtual environment is those things are gone. You don't have between the meetings. You only have the meeting. And so what you have to do is create those opportunities artificially. Right? Prescriptively, you have to force it to happen. So one easy thing to do we've embraced in our company is a Monday morning huddle where.
It'S encouraged that as many people show up as possible. Of course, if you have client stuff, you go do that. But as many people on an operating team come together and just check in with each other. And it's not about work. There's zero discussion of work. It's what's on your heart and mind. And then we answer a funny or provocative question that whoever's leading huddle that month will pose to the team. And it's an opportunity for us to connect as human beings. Where we say, this weekend was a hard weekend, my dad was admitted to hospital, or this weekend was a great weekend because I got to spend some time with the kids. I didn't even know you had kids. And we get to see each other as human beings and it goes a long way. It seems small and silly, but over the course of time, we start to learn about each other and see each other as people rather than just as co workers or encouraging people to have work sessions with each other where you turn on FaceTime or Zoom or something, and although you're not having a meeting, you just have them there while you're doing your work or having drinks together or I'm a huge fan of using the telephone because I actually think you can connect even better over the telephone than sometimes over Zoom. And like, if you have an issue, instead of sending an email, pick up the phone and call somebody because very often you'll solve the problem quicker. And it's not 55 backwards and forwards, but you'll probably learn something new. And you can hear a tone of voice which is all goes to building relationships. So.
We already know how to do it, it's just a matter of doing it.
