Conversations With Our Connections

Conversation Across Your Networks, Part 2. A series focused on conversation within The Networks of Relationships Series.

Connection Patterns, Pre-Digital Age

Long before the internet and social media came to dominate our lives, I was concerned about what I saw happening with people and their organizations. I don’t think it was a mistaken impression derived from my work at the time as an urban community minister. The people that I was meeting outside the doors of the church, on the streets, and from the city’s housing blocks, were at that time lacking in the skills and the knowledge that they needed to manage the complexity of modern life.

The patterns of behavior that I saw were the lack of capacity of people to function well in a socially aggressive world of business. Psychologists talk about dominance hierarchies. I saw this in full view through the lens of a wide spectrum of relationships with people who were poor and illiterate and those who were some of the wealthiest, most philanthropic people in our city. The skills gap between these two ends of the social spectrum was telling. Two examples illustrate what I observed.

What does Job Readiness Mean?

One of our projects was a non-profit incubator. We provided free office space to fledgling programs seeking to develop as an organization. One of the start-ups was a jobs readiness program for homeless men and women. Not only did they have to be trained to know how to function in a work context – arrive before the time your shift begins; wear clean clothes. But they need to be taught basic life management skills like how to manage their money and care for the room that they were provided to live in. Some had the mental capacity to learn and to change. Others did not either through the accidents of birth (low IQ) or through the damaging effects of substance abuse.

What does Board Governance Mean?

During this same period, I interacted with a wide range of organizations. Two, in particular, stand out as the opposite ends of the spectrum of governance leadership. Both organizations had boards of directors that were the same size, with about 45 members.

The first organization, a large non-profit, a half decade before, had gone through a significant leadership transition. The former leader had been with the organization for over thirty years. While not the founder, he functioned as if he was. He was a very charismatic, yet control-oriented executive. With the board of directors, he made the decisions and the board approved them. When he retired, it took the organization quite some time to find its next leader. This person came with the exact opposite philosophy of board governance. He wanted the board to be decisive and make their own decisions. Yet, he did not have the skill set to equip the board to be a deliberative body. A kindly, highly moral, rather passive leader who was the first of two transitional leaders. Even with weak executive leadership, and a divided, poorly skilled board, the organization’s staff held the organization together during a long transition period before an able, effective senior leader ultimately was found.

The other organization was a community/business group, where I was invited to join the board of directors. It was the first time I experienced a board function as a unified body. No one person issued directives from on high. The board functioned as a unified board where everyone participated and contributed to the organization’s impact on our community. For me, it was the birth of my calling into the world of leadership.

How did I make sense of the difference between these two boards?

It wasn’t a difference in leadership philosophy or organizational purpose

The difference was in how the structure of each organization facilitated the connections between people and the organization.

With the first organization, the structure was designed for connection between people, but not with the leadership. The senior executive stood apart as sort of the lord of the principality. In the second organization, the structure was created for the connection of the board with each other and the constituents of the organization. In essence, the organization functioned as a community of leaders. This experience had such a profound effect on me that when I began my consulting practice ten years later, I named it Community of Leadership.

I realize that much of the conversation that we have with people who are our contacts in business and community organizations is similar to the reporting that we see on the evening news. We speak in sound bites. We make statements of fact or opinion. We ask questions for clarification. We speak to inform and guide perception in specific directions. We tell stories to describe our experiences and values.

These conversations tend to be flat and impersonal, even if they are told with warmth and passion. They are not intended to create impact. Impact is a change that makes a difference that matters. At best, they are intended to influence. Influence is a kind of appreciation and approval of an idea or a perspective. It is like joining a tribe. We are not talking about change. We are talking about connection. And a connection with a person is not the same as a relationship.

Watch this clip of Max Fisher talking about the effect that social media has on us.

Leadership in the Context of Social Media Connections

About thirty years ago, social media interaction began to emerge as a new social context. I am too old to be a digital native. I remember the old analog days of connection and relationship. I remember writing letters instead of texting and phoning.

As social media developed, platforms came and went, yet the nature of our connections did not remain the same. The transition was from a surface-level interaction, as described above. to a more passive and disconnected one. This trend runs counter to what I was discovering in my research and experience in the field of leadership. There I saw that when people “took personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters”, they were becoming more deeply engaged with the lives of people.

My assumption is that anyone can be an impact leader. It doesn’t mean they take on the role of leader as the CEO of a company. It means that their life has meaning through the impact that they are creating through their taking personal initiative. To be an impact leader means that you lay aside a passive-aggressive relation to social media. You turn towards your neighbor and start building a relationship where together you can make a difference that matters.

This isn’t some new way of understanding leadership. People have been doing this for a long time and are still doing it today. They make a difference that matters in their families, at their kid’s schools, and even at the workplace that constitutes leadership impact. What distinguishes personal leadership from organizational leadership is the difference between leadership and management. This difference matters because it has a huge effect on how organizations function. When the leadership that average people perform does not get the recognition that they deserve, it often forces them into a more passive, do-as-little-as-possible-to-get-by attitude.  

Ironically, social media feeds off this passivity as well. If we spend just a little time scanning through the feed on any platform. We can observe two phenomena. We find people expressing short sentiments of support. “Congrats on your new position!” “Thanks for sharing.” “Beautiful!” And, then there are those who find the need to correct a statement or a perspective. Many of these people want to be seen as an expert who either ends or extends discussion through their better-informed opinion. As a result, people who are not looking for an argument, turn away, looking to find something more pleasant to read or watch.

The problem isn’t that social media is not a place to take leadership initiative.

It is rather not a place where conversation can easily be conducted.

The result is that we become passive receptors of other people’s expert opinions.

Over time, those opinions begin to reform our own perceptions so that we find ourselves in agreement.

If you look back over the past decade on your involvement in social media, I suspect that you will find that you keep discovering new people to follow and that there also exists a level of anxiety about the effect of social media on your own life.

I find that social media breeds passivity, not interconnectivity. This is a slice of what Charles Arthur * and Max Fisher ** are conveying to us. For some people, passive-aggressiveness emerges as their default manner with people. Offer a contrary opinion and you may hear, as I have, how you are insane and a danger to society. Even if you have a valid opinion based on your knowledge and experience, it is difficult to create an impact that makes a difference that matters.

As a society we find ourselves becoming angrier and angrier about things that we are reading and watching. We do not realize that this is a strategy intended to neutralize or pacify people while segregating them into smaller and smaller tribal groups. It is both an ingenious and insidious form of mass communication. See this review of Max Fisher’s book, The Chaos Machine. **

Why Leadership and Conversation Go Hand-in-Hand

Dominance hierarchies are not just a feature of corporate environments, Hollywood star power, and professional sports teams. They are also present on social media. The presumption is that a TikTok personality with several million viewers is at the top of the social media dominance hierarchy. If so, is this a function of the passive nature of the social media experience? Is this what Charles Arnold was pointing to in his excellent Substack post, The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us.

“In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?”

Arthur continues this thought in his next post If There Was Only a Phrase for It.

It’s no surprise, though, that multiple people are writing about the broader effects of social media. It’s become so embedded in our culture—in politics, sport, news—that there are people turning up for university today who never knew a time before Facebook. They were two years old when Twitter was invented. They were three when Tumblr came online. This is about the time when you would expect to see the effects of these networks being pervasive in our culture starting to come into view. I called it social warming…

If you value your own actions for impact in your community, done in collaboration with your coworkers and with family and friends, you know there is a qualitative difference between taking personal initiative to create impact and swiping up on your phone for three hours a day watching 15-second videos.

A few weeks ago, I found myself doing this very thing watching TikTok videos. As soon as I realized that I was being programmed to be drawn to my phone whenever there was a second delay in decisiveness, I deleted the app from my phone.

This suggests to me that our connections with people going back to at least the beginning of the age of visual media were not leading to deeper, more meaningful relationships. The connections are necessary for work but not essential for life. If you experience moments of anxiety, even moments of emptiness, or what philosophers used to call ennui, then it will show itself in your relationships with people.

Where is Conversation to be Found?

Notice that I have said very little about conversation in this post about conversation? It is because social media is not interested in our conversations. It is interesting in our attention to the screen. The more eyes on the screen, the more ad revenue for the platform.

Conversation is to be found in real human interaction.

Somewhere, in the midst of our involvement on social media, we need to wrestle with the purpose of our involvement. Social media has become a simulated form of our life.*** We associate with people who we want to be like. We are emotionally moved by stories, so we click share and a viral cascade begins. We respond to images, messages, and communications that frame ways to see our lives. At least, it feels this way.

What can we really say is the impact of social media on us?

If leadership is important, we need to find out how our social media interaction can facilitate it. If leadership is a human function, how can our participation in social media facilitate our capacity to take personal initiative to create impact? Ultimately, we have to decide how to have conversations in the context of these platforms that are not really set up for it.

My conclusion is that social media has revealed to us that we really don’t know how to have conversations. We talk. We check a box. We subscribe. And we watch, listen, and continue to swipe to the next story. We need to look more seriously at what conversation really should be about so that we can learn to take personal initiative to create the conversations that we need in social media settings.

To ask this question requires us to look within ourselves for the truth of who we are and who want to be. This truth, I am convinced, cannot be discovered in connection, but in relationships. Relationships where we find respect, trust, accountability, openness, vulnerability, and shared commitment to values that provide us a life as leaders of impact in our local communities.

*Charles Arthur, Social Warming: How Social Media Polarizes Us All.

** Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

*** The Culture of Simulation Series, The Future of Leadership with Ed Brenegar