Human issues Archives - Leading Virtually

Should you care that someone’s not reciprocating your friendship?

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 13:22:48 +0000

If I think of you as a friend, then there’s about 50% likelihood that you don’t think of me likewise.

That’s disturbing, isn’t it?

Well, it should be. Good friendship is vital to our physical and emotional health. A Harvard study that spanned more than 75 years concluded that the single most important determinant of our well-being, including financial, is the quality of our relationships, which certainly include our friendships. Even in the workplace, friendship can be a source of happiness and improve our work performance by leading to trusting relationships in which those involved have each other’s back.

What really prompted me to write this article is a recent study that examined reciprocity in friendships and the effect it has on the influence one has over another. Its finding about the existence of reciprocity was quite consistent with what previous studies have also found. Essentially, when those you identify as friends are asked to identify who their friends are, studies indicate that there is only a 34 to 53 percent chance that they would identify you as their friend.

Of course, lack of reciprocity in friendship is not really good news for developing high quality relationships. In the workplace, the lack of reciprocity in friendships can be damaging in a variety of ways. Among those is the limiting of our ability to influence others, which then affects our ability to engage others in collective action and collaborate with them — something that organizations expect us to do more of today.

The lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be due to the fact that it is not humanly possible to be friends with everyone. Robin Dunbar, a social psychologist, has proposed a limit to the number of stable social relationships one can have: 150. The basis for Dunbar’s number is human cognitive limitations. Technology, with all its information processing prowess, may help us push beyond the limits imposed by our cognitive apparatus but, apparently, not by much. While technology may help us broadcast our life happenings to others and help us stay acquainted with others, research is reasonably clear that technology does little to strengthen our close relationships — those which can be a source of comfort and emotional support as well as amplification of our happiness. We are generally limited to only about 5 such relationships, with our spouse or significant other occupying the most premier position for many of us.

In the office, the lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be a reflection of what Adam Grant notes to be a trend among Americans to de-emphasize workplace friendships. He attributes this to a variety of reasons including the disappearance of long-term employment with a single employer, the use of flex work hours and remote work, the availability of technology that allows us to be in constant touch with our friends outside work, Protestant beliefs that may encourage greater focus on work, and the more current generations looking at work as means to leisure time after work.

While research suggests that it may be best for you to develop a reciprocated friendship with someone since the influence you have on each other is likely to be the strongest, it is not entirely a lost cause if you see someone as a friend but your friendship is not reciprocated. A study suggests that when the goals or rewards you seek are dependent on the performance of someone who does not reciprocate your friendship, you may still be able to influence that person. Your sense of dependence on someone you see as a friend may make you communicate in a way that ends up influencing that person. For example, you may communicate with kindness and consideration that moves the other person.

So, go ahead and be friendly towards others irrespective of whether your friendship is reciprocated. Be sure to see yourself as dependent on them in some way. This will increase the level of influence you have on them and, at the very least, make you look like a leader in their eyes.

Acknowledgment: I wish to thank Theresa Sigillito Hollema for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

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The Human Behind Humans of New York

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:31:40 +0000

A little over a month ago, I had the opportunity to attend a talk at Cornell University by Brandon Stanton, the author of Humans of New York (HONY). A very eloquent speaker, Mr. Stanton kept his audience engaged with his stories of how he has interviewed thousands of people not only in New York City but across the world. What I took away was the importance of the human element when leading via technology. Technology is helping us spread our word far and wide but a human heart is what gives it the voice that others can connect with.

Behind the social media powering HONY is a human who has overcome the fear of rejection on his way to amassing a worldwide following but still feeling vulnerable like the rest of us. When asked about his biggest fear, he replied that he sees himself as someone who is not a good person but is now entrusted with a job that is noble. He is afraid that the things that he did during his younger years might be exposed on the Internet and sully his image. I felt that his fear, paradoxically, was also his strength; it showed the vulnerability he perceived. A leader who feels powerful and invincible cannot connect with others. Humility and a feeling of vulnerability are needed to empathize with others and connect with them.

The importance of the human element in connecting with others was also highlighted in Mr. Stanton’s experience traveling abroad during the last two summers. Mr. Stanton mentioned the engagement of his social media followers fell during his Summer 2014 travels but stayed normal during his most recent travels. He attributed this shift to the choices of his interpreters. His 2014 linguists were skillful at translating accurately but they failed to connect on a human level with those he interviewed. This year, he changed his strategy to choose interpreters who were ‘people’ oriented and found that they made all the difference in bringing out impactful stories.

Another story Mr. Stanton shared highlighted the importance of creating a culture of humanness. Some have criticized Mr. Stanton’s work for not following journalistic standards. He half-jokingly remarked that, indeed, he does not fact check if someone is narrating from personal experience. He went on to illustrate that what he hears from someone is indeed a story in their head and that it is significant even if it is distorted.

The example he gave was of someone who claimed to be a Navy Seal and said that his father served in the military. After this person’s story was posted on HONY, former acquaintances of his commented on the post and painted him as a chronic liar who had made up all that he claimed. Mr. Stanton took down the post but a month after that he received an email from the individual’s mother asking him if she could get a copy of the picture he had posted of her son. Her son, she wrote in the email, had committed suicide. Social media technology, because of the way it reaches and touches different people far and wide, has the tendency to bring out the truth. As this example shows, this truth can sometimes be uncontainable and hurt badly.

There is no way a leader can withhold the truth from coming to fruition. Nor should one try to do that. A leader also cannot be in a position to judge what is a lie and what is the truth. Indeed, Mr. Stanton noted that there is a fine line between what is a story of someone’s life and a falsehood. My suggestion to leaders is to foster a culture of compassion and forgiveness. Forgiveness is a virtue that helps us live in the present and look forward to an engaging future instead of clinging onto a painful past. While the above example alone solidifies the significance of forgiveness to a life, emerging research (see 1, 2) is suggesting that creating a culture of forgiveness may bring physical, mental, and organizational benefits.

I am glad I got to attend Mr. Stanton’s presentation. It offered a different perspective than what I get to see when I read HONY. It reinforced the continued importance of the human element in a world where our interactions are increasingly mediated by technology.

Continue to stay human, Mr. Stanton. You’ll do fine.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Arina Zanin for providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

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Humans of New York: An Illustration of How IT is Affecting Leadership

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:11:00 +0000

My two decades of research on leadership and information technology (IT) has led me to believe that people think that leadership is not affected by IT and, consequently, the way in which leadership has worked in traditional and formal settings would work online too. Or they may believe otherwise but they lack specifics and wish to know more. Finding a good story that shows how IT can affect leadership and to which others can relate is challenging. A recent story makes this job a little easier. It is that of Humans of New York (HONY) and its author, Brandon Stanton. HONY appears on various social media including Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook. I am focusing on Facebook because that is where I most clearly see how leadership is impacted by technology.

Every day Mr. Stanton posts 3 to 4 pictures of individuals, young and old from different walks of life, whom he encounters when walking in the streets of New York. Each picture is accompanied by a brief story or quote. By his admission, Mr. Stanton has walked thousands of miles and stopped ten thousand people to photograph them. Last October, he published a New York Times bestseller with four hundred of his pictures. He hopes to continue taking and posting pictures for a long time. Mr. Stanton’s work has been described as beautiful, a celebration of individuality, and a tribute to the spirit of New York.

Mr. Stanton has amassed a huge following from all over the world. Though he did not set out to become a leader, he has become one — he is able to engage people and influence them in a way that appointed leaders would give anything for. What is really illustrative of Mr. Stanton’s leadership is the community he has enabled. When you view any HONY post, you see a healthy conversation in the form of an extremely large number of likes and comments. You find people sharing stories that illustrate the triumphs and travails in their own lives. Many other jump in to congratulate those succeeding and to support those facing challenges. It is not uncommon for those commenting to amass a large number of likes and comments themselves.

What makes Mr. Stanton a leader? What has helped him become one? Mr. Stanton’s leadership role can be seen in how he is helping others make better sense of the world around them and how they fit into it. He writes posts that others find as touching because they can identify with them. They see something about their own lives in the posts. It may be a personal triumph or challenge. HONY’s stories evoke basic human values of care and concern for others irrespective of their race, nationality, gender, and other characteristics. People feel good when the stories make them feel human. A post and the ensuing conversation may remind people of something that may be missing from their lives such as a relationship, the love of someone, or being with someone they love. By being validated and knowing that they are not alone in how they feel and what they experience, readers feel empowered.

Mr. Stanton has also become a leader by stimulating others to think differently, thereby disrupting existing patterns of thought and behavior. Recently, Mr. Stanton embarked on an eight country UN sponsored tour. As part of that, he visited and posted stories of Syrian refugees camped in Jordan. These stories are unlike those of the fighting in Syria and its victims, which usually evoke feelings of horror. Some readers say that by observing the stories of others, they have learned more about what being human means — more than what their school books have taught them. Others mentioned how the tragic stories were breaking their hearts. Many remarked how fortunate and grateful they are for what they have in their lives. Some noted the resiliency of the human spirit.

One can also see Mr. Stanton as a leader in the ‘swarm like’ emergent behavior he enables. After Mr. Stanton makes a post, his followers collectively address the post without any external coordinating mechanisms or any explicitly posted rules. Occasionally, you notice conflict when posters counter others’ interpretations. For most part these conversations remain respectful. But when some cross the limits of respectful behavior, others jump in to control the conversation and prevent it from going out of control.

So, what does HONY illustrate about IT’s effect on leadership? It illustrates that technology enables the emergence of unappointed, informal leaders who have a powerful influence over others. The networking, viral communication, and widespread reach enabled by technology makes it more likely for those with an appealing vision to be discovered by people from different corners of the world. These individuals are not ordered to follow the leader. They do so because they feel an emotional connection to the leader, the leader’s vision, and the leader’s work. The leader is passionate about her/his vision and is constantly modeling it through actions shared via technology. After stimulating action, the leader gets out of the way. The followers, with the help of technology, take it up upon themselves to share their thoughts, their interests, and become leaders in their own right. There is no top-down system through which leadership is exercised.

This effect of IT is not restricted to the non-corporate setting only. It can occur in and is relevant for all types of settings. In today’s highly complex and dynamic environment, leaders cannot take it all upon themselves to interface with the outside world or even those within their own organization. A leader cannot be at all the places demanding attention. Not only is the pace relentless but the variety of issues is too large for one supreme leader to be able to handle all events in a timely and competent fashion. An emergent, self-organizing system, such as one envisioned by the US Intelligence Agencies, is needed. Others will have to be empowered to rise, respond, and engage others to rise too. Smart leaders create conditions for others to emerge as leaders and then get out of the way. They create an emotionally engaging vision that others can relate to readily. They share their vision, model that vision, and stimulate a conversation among their followers. They don’t try to control the events. Instead, they become facilitators who remove the barriers and make it easy for others to make their contributions towards the leaders’ vision. The followers then take off. Some emerge as leaders themselves.

Technology, especially social media, plays a critical role in enabling this type of leadership. For how else will the leader be able to engage a multitude of people beyond her/his immediate span of control? Engaging a lot of people and that too from different domains and walks of life is critical because it is not possible to predict the situation one will be facing in the future and thus anticipate who might be ready to emerge as a leader or simply participate. Only technology can enable such an engagement. Though HONY has been around for a while, it was only after it moved to social media where others and their actions could not be controlled that it really took off!

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What does humanizing your business mean?

Surinder Kahai — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 02:16:45 +0000

In my teaching, I have often emphasized the need for businesses to use social media to humanize and build an emotional connection with their customers. This is extremely critical for small businesses that don’t have a lot of money for expensive promotions. Of course, when using social media, promotions are generally not as successful as emotional engagement but some businesses that have money prefer promotions to building emotional engagement.

The importance of emotional engagement was reinforced by a recent Harvard Business Review article. The author of the article, who is the CEO of Rakuten, the world’s 3rd largest e-commerce site after Amazon and eBay, describes how he established the site in the late 1990s to enable small businesses to set up small stores — something that Amazon has popularized more recently. What is unique about the sellers on Rakuten is that they try to set up a boutique or a small store feeling. The sellers become curators of the merchandise that they sell and interact personally with their customers. Instead of turning to their family and friends for recommendations, customers at Rakuten turn to the store owners for recommendations because they become like friends to them. Merchants who tell personal stories and make connections with customers do very well.

The author tells the story of a farmer who wanted to sell eggs on the site. The author was not convinced that selling eggs on the site was a good idea, given that one could buy eggs easily at the supermarket. The farmer thought otherwise, because his eggs were organic and were from chickens that were fed a special diet. Additionally, since he planned to ship the eggs overnight, they would be fresher than the supermarket eggs, which were at least a week old. After he set up his store on Rakuten, he started a daily chick diary to let his customers know the status of his birds. He devised a toothpick test to check the quality of his eggs — if the toothpick held firm when stuck into the yolk of an egg from a new batch, it showed that the eggs in that batch were of superior quality — and posted photos of the test. He told interesting stories that encouraged people to try his eggs. Though he sold his eggs at a premium, once people tried his eggs, they continued to buy from him.

Conversations and stories, it seems, are the way to engage customers emotionally. Social media, by itself, will not engage your customers. But it affords you the opportunities to have conversations and tell stories.

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Not all kinds of happiness are the same

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 18:51:55 +0000

In one of my past blog posts, I had talked about happiness and how it can lead to success. I had also covered some ways in which one can be happy. Now we have some research that suggests that we seek the eudaemonic kind of happiness, whereby the focus is on serving others and a higher purpose, over the hedonic kind, whereby the focus is on seeking personal pleasure.

Research is suggesting that in case you seek eudaeomonic happiness more than hedonic happiness, you may be doing your health a big favor! Such people’s antibody genes are 30% more active and their interferons, which help our immunity, are 10% more active than those of individuals preferring hedonic pleasures. In those preferring hedonic happiness over the eudaemonic kind, the inflammation causing genes were 20% more active and those associated with the production of virus-attacking antibodies were 20% less active.

It looks like Socrates, who advocated pursing a virtue filled life for happiness, was right all along!

In the long run, selfless, public-serving happiness may be winning over the selfish, pleasure seeking kind by leading to better health!

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Social Media is a Matter of the Heart

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 15:48:18 +0000

Many in my generation question the value of social media — the kind in which people engage in social chit-chat. A father, whose 31 year old daughter married recently, was no different. It was at his daughter’s wedding that he learned about the usefulness of social media for staying connected on a human level and enriching one’s life. His earlier thinking was that social media took time away from one’s career, family, and deep relationships. Over the years, however, he lost touch with his friends because they had all moved away from each other and began to focus on their careers and families.

His daughter, unlike him, did not lose touch with her friends. He finds out during her wedding that people in her generation don’t choose between work and friendships. They choose both. With the help of seemingly mundane exchanges via social media, they maintain their friendships while also pursuing their ambitions. Inspired by what he saw in his daughter’s case, he begins using social media with greater vigor and posts pictures and videos from his daughter’s wedding. Soon, his old friends reconnected with him. Their comments and “likes” piled up. He sent friend requests to his daughter’s friends, which were quickly accepted. Though these were small gestures, he found them to be intimate and nourishing.

This whole experience affected the father deeply enough to prompt him to write about it in a touching article at NYTimes. I strongly suggest that you read it. His concluding paragraph, in which he refers to his daughter Kate, gives us a sense of the true meaning of social media.

I see now how much I’ve given up over the years by keeping my work focus so central and my circle so narrow. I understand more viscerally why Kate and her friends spend so much time keeping up on social media. It’s nearly a week since the wedding, the “likes” keep coming, and my heart still feels wide open.

Social media is a matter of the heart. If you’re not touching someone’s heart or if others are not touching yours, then you’re probably not using it right. Unlike most other things which lessen when used, our heart only gets bigger when we give place in it to others.

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What a Father May Really Want for Father’s Day

Surinder Kahai — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:16:05 +0000

Though I have not been blogging actively, Leading Virtually continues to be popular among its readers. I thank all its readers for their interest and loyalty. While I mull over posts that focus on this blog’s theme, I thought I might share something that touches us all. Something that is more immediate. Tomorrow is father’s day. It’s a reminder that we are members of a family before anything else. It’s a reminder for us to give importance to our connections as human beings. I would argue that this suggestion is no different from what this blog suggests about how we lead virtually. Virtual no longer remains as such if we infuse humaneness in all that we do virtually. When something touches our hearts, it becomes real. With that in mind, and as a father, I would like to share my thoughts on what a father may really want for father’s day.

The other day I asked my daughter what she thought I wanted for father’s day. “A tie? sunglasses? a lawnmower? a breakfast that I make for you?” she quizzed me. I thought to myself that she had absolutely no clue about what would really make me happy. After a moment, I realized that I couldn’t possibly expect her to know what I really wanted. I had never told my children what would really make me happy on father’s day.

It would be the feeling I had when I held my children for the first time.

I have two children, Preet and Sahiba. Preet is the protective elder brother to Sahiba, who will always be his little sister. Even though the feelings I had when Preet and Sahiba were born were the same, the thoughts from Sahiba’s birth are more vivid because of their recency. Of course, I thought that she was the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt on the top of this world. Because I thought I was the most powerful person in this world. Here was someone tender who needed me. And I was going to take care of her. And give her the best things in life. I was the one who was going to protect her from any harm. I was the one who was going to give her unconditional love and, that too, without stopping for a moment. I was the one who would never put her down, no matter how tired I got. I was the happiest person in this world and no one could take this source of happiness away from me. Because it was all mine.

So you see, what caused this happiness was not some “thing” that this baby was going to do for me or give me. It was what I could do for her and give her. This baby needed me to survive, grow, and flourish and I was there to do all it takes to make that happen.

I would give anything to have that feeling again.

I don’t want a new tie, a new pair of sunglasses, or a new lawnmower. I don’t want someone to make anything for me. Instead, I want to feel that my children need my love and care. I want to feel that they need me to buffer them from the cruel challenges of life. I want to feel that I have in me what it takes to make them happy. I want to feel that I make a difference in my children’s lives like nobody can.

Your dad may very well be like me. To make him feel this way, don’t give or make anything for him. Instead, make him feel that he can still do for you and give you all that he wanted to when he held you for the first time. Show him that you are still vulnerable and you need him by your side to be the best that you can be. You will make him feel that he can take on anything in this world for your sake. That’s the best thing a father can ask for on father’s day.

Or on any other day, for that matter.

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