Connecting with people before collaborating with them

Years ago, in a video by Marshall Rosenberg with the topic of nonviolent communication, I heard a phrase that at that moment was hard to understand, but for some reason also hard to forget.

In that video, Rosenberg said:
“Remember: empathic connection before education”

I researched empathy and connections, but still, I couldn’t really figure out how that phrase applied to my daily job.

It was after many years that I was able to grasp the importance of the phrase. Nowadays, it is the pilar of my job here at Takeaway.com. It is the most important phrase for everything we do.

In short, it’s quite simple: You need to have a personal connection before you give an advice, you teach something or you try to convince someone. This also applies to giving a presentation to other colleagues in the company or a workshop to other departments.

To be honest, at the beginning, I thought this couldn’t be true. I have given plenty of advice to people I’m not connected to. I’ve also seen successful discussions between people who just met for the first time, so it was really hard to convince myself that this meaning could be real.

Finally I understood it like this: if you build an empathic connection with a person, you might find solutions that satisfy both needs, which is already pretty good, but most importantly, you build resilience in the relationship.

To make it clearer imagine the following: you come to a new team, you have an idea and decide to set up a meeting with some team members. You start talking and explaining and everything looks fine. The conversation seems to be going in the right direction and suddenly PUM! you said something that makes no sense to the others. Maybe you forgot an important detail, maybe you said something in a way you didn’t mean (too arrogant or aggressive, for example), and it’s over! If you have amazing colleagues, they will forgive you by thinking “well, this person is new in the company, he/she doesn’t understand”. They might even help you with suggestions and not everything was lost. But if your colleagues, on the other hand, are not so amazing and forgiving, expect some problems in the future. I’ve seen this pattern in many new team members who later complain saying “the team is not open to change” or “they don’t listen”. At the same time, the team complains, “well, she/he is too new and doesn’t understand how things work”.

Now, imagine a second scenario in which you already connected with your team. You know what is important to them and you know that even if you say something that you didn’t mean, they will ignore it and work with you. You built resilience into your relationship.

It might sound obvious, but most of the teams I’ve met in the past forget this little phrase: we need to create empathic connections inside our team before anything else.

What is an empathic connection?

Just to clarify when we talk about empathic connection, it’s not about “being friends” with everyone or asking about their personal life. It’s about understanding what is important to the other person, what her/his needs for the topic are and then explaining ours. That’s all. Seems easy, but it requires work. There are many topics to discuss and to understand, so this is a daily job. If you have processes that enable this type of connection, it will grow over time.

Preventing disconnection

Now, when working with a team, you also should try to prevent things that disconnect them. For example, when people are disrespectful to each other, when they use the phone during a conversation, when people make fun of someone any small thing that might reduce trust should be avoided. This is a task that we all share in my current team and I am happy to bring it up as often as required ;-)

What now?

Well, if you want your teams to improve their communication, discussions, and in general the working environment, invest time into creating connections between them. Try to come up with creative ideas that enable these connections and include them in your processes. In my current team, for example, we have included ideas into the recruitment, onboarding and feedback processes, but also in some of our development practices. Hmm, that might be maybe a good idea for a new article :-)

And, of course, if you are curious about how we are applying this and other ideas in our different teams, why not experience it by yourself? Just visit our careers page and our Tech jobs at Takeaway.com!