Our need for belonging
On a digital or virtual team? Craving more connection as you navigate the tendrils of internet life?
Yeah me too.
As we navigate the pandemic on the Internet, the world of Zoom and online group connection relieves our loneliness and complicates working together.
Much has been written on our collective experience of anxiety and depression due to the vacuous nature of social media. Our endless scrolling and posting is emboldened by the human tendencies of comparison, performance, and envy. These inclinations leave us ungrounded and still pining for connection and belonging.
So when we began working and schooling from home, the promise of shared meet-up spaces like MS Teams and Zoom offered another relief for our physically distanced bodies and psyches.
But after months of working apart, leaders and their teams are challenged to create meaningful spaces of connection as the complexity (and disconnection) of our world grows.
Now more than ever, leaders need to foster a felt experience of connection and interdependence.
Leaders are living the questions– how can I successfully manage a team that rarely, if ever, comes together in person? How do I navigate the tension between independence and accountability, without micromanaging? How do I demonstrate flexibility and manage accountability from afar? How can I enhance connection through time and space?
To create connection- start with aliveness
To become an instrument of connection, we must start with our own aliveness.
Aliveness is the animation of your attention. Meaning, it is the river of energy, that weaves together your heart, mind, spirit, and body.
It’s experienced when you’re attentive to what’s in front of you. It’s the force that’s generated when you’re curious, empathetic, heart-centered, and in tune with something bigger than yourself.
When you are in touch with what brings you alive with energy, you can skillfully bring this experience to bear on the distracted, banal or physically distanced workplace- and most importantly, your interpersonal relationships.
And you know, all too well, of all the ways your aliveness is diminished: unrelenting demands from both professional and domestic fronts, the constant anticipation of disruption and the fear of polarization and violence in declining democracies worldwide.
Track and follow your energy
To be an instrument of aliveness, attention is needed to where it feels diminished and amplified.
Pay attention to where your own energy and aliveness are diminished. Can you feel when your interest and motivation begins to cease? Aware when structures, power dynamics, or processes bring you down? Or, where you diminish your own participation, contributions, or truth telling? When you ignore your own gut or intuition?
Conversely, where is your energy and aliveness amplified? When do you feel light, agile, and whole? Inspired to give, create or build? Where do you trust your gut and intuition, and follow its lead? What re-energizes you?
Being able to track and follow your own energy supports the capacity to read others, and the room, even virtually. Connection and belonging with your teammates depends on it.
11 ways to increase connection and aliveness on virtual teams
When you’re connecting online through Zoom, Face Time, or Skype…here are eleven ways to animate and attend to relationships in a generative way:
#1. Skillful and wise speech: be truthful, clear and direct in your speech with others (even more important when virtual). This is a mindfulness practice. For difficult conversations, prepare ahead and only engage when you’re coming from a place where you are ‘for’ the other person (their dignity, learning and growth).
#2. Express empathy and compassion to lead with heart. Create time for sharing, honesty, and vulnerability. Ask your teammates how often they’d like to connect and find a balance between connection and efficient work.
#3. Cultivate your Presence. When online, reduce distractions by minimizing browser tabs, turning notifications off and observe tendencies to multitask. Be fully present and give your full attention. Focus on eyes and facial expressions of your teammates, to receive and respond to their energy, mood, state, and emotions.
#4. Revisit your team’s commitments and values (co-create them if you haven’t yet), and explore together how they’ll be enlivened through online and physically distanced meetings.
#5. Set clear intentions (personally and group), objectives, roles, and time lines for each meeting. This will support clarity and focus. Meetings with loose agendas and fuzzy objectives waste time and deplete energy and engagement quickly.
#6. Work with energy intuitively. When group energy is low, name it, invite observations and draw on creativity and playfulness to increase the energy of your team. When group energy is high (scattered or overwhelmed), name it, invite observation and use grounding practices like mindfulness, short durations of silence, or smaller group breakouts (one/ones).
#7. Schedule time for one-ones, where you can take more time to be curious and present to the unique and wilder life context of your teammates.
#8. During a time of heightened equality issues, like racism, colonization and sexism and polarity, work on your ability to acknowledge and attend. Strengthen your ability to host and participate in compassionate and courageous conversations.
#9. Ignite opportunities for everyone to contribute their ideas and energy. Ask for people’s help. Create opportunities to empower and engage the wisdom and experience of your teammates. Reflect frequently on how you’re fostering inclusion and group cohesion, while being efficient.
#10. Experiment with tech. On-line technology is rapidly evolving. MS Teams, Zoom, and Google Hangouts are experimenting with polling, chats, breakout rooms, and live document production.
#11. Host drop in lunch/happy hour regularly to connect informally. Play music (share playlists) in the background to create a more relaxed state/environment.
Practice-Animating your Own Aliveness with Attention
As you play with enhancing aliveness and connection across virtual and digital spaces, here is a simple micro practice. It explores the relationship between attention and your sensation of aliveness.
- Take 5 minutes to explore what happens when you bring all of your awareness and attention to ONE part of your body. Begin with a hand.
- Imagine your mind like a flashlight, bringing all the light and focus to your hand. As you focus and concentrate, see if you can feel any sensations in the hand. How do they change as you continue to bring your awareness?
- On another day, you can experiment with another part of your body: a foot, leg, shoulders, forehead, lips, eyes…
In light of this practice, here are some further questions for leadership inquiry:
- When I focus on my own aliveness, what do I notice? What insights do this micro-practice bring to my leadership?
- How does my own energy and aliveness cultivate connection and quality relational experiences with my teammates? Why?
- Where does the energy of my team feel dampened or contracted? What is contributing to this? How can my awareness, attention and aliveness support a shift in the energy?
- Where does the energy of my team feel energized and alive? What is contributing to this? How can my awareness, attention and aliveness amplify the upsides to this energy?
The driveshaft of connection and belonging is our own aliveness. In the simplest form, when we invite our truest and most authentic expression of ourselves- we invite the truest and most authentic expressions of others.
In person, or virtually, we need each other more than ever to evolve our planetary state into equality, justice, peace and sustainability.
Now I’d love to hear from you below- what brings you most alive and your team? Join the conversation!
Jennifer
