Back when I was in my corporate period, I visited our field facilities regularly. The visits had two purposes. One was to raise the corporate flag and remind everyone that we were all in it together. The other was to work on manager development.
I used to sit down with the facility manager and review the contents of his in and out-boxes. The exercise gave me a good sense of what was going on there and several springboards for conversation. On one of those visits, a manager showed me a memo that he wrote to the sales manager who had an office in the facility. The subject was a fairly routine matter.
I was concerned. I asked the manager why he wrote a memo, instead of simply walking the fifteen feet or so to the sales manager’s office and having a conversation. His behavior seemed bizarre to me. I believe that conversation is the primary tool that managers use to get things done.
Today technology has made it easier for managers like that one to avoid conversation. Email and text messaging are quick and easy. Conversation is richer, but also messier, and, it turns out to be a declining skill among those coming into our talent development pipelines today.
Dorothy Dalton recently wrote a post titled, “The declining art of conversation and Gen Y recruitment benchmarks” about the impact on recruiting. Here’s a money quote.
“So although we know that Millenials communicate and socialise differently to other generations, at some point they do have to engage with people outside their age group. What happens when skills core to the talent identification process are deficient?”
Sherry Turkle calls what’s happening “The Flight from Conversation.” She describes the situation this way.
“Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention.”
If your job is talent development, this will become your problem. We have to revise our recruiting, on-boarding, and other processes to make them more effective in the face of this techno-social challenge. But there’s more.
Managers need to learn how to create teams from individuals who are, to use Ms Turkle’s term, used to being “alone together.” Leadership development will need increase and improve the way we teach communication.
For years we’ve atomized the workforce. Individuals in matrix organizations don’t belong to permanent teams. Telework has offered autonomy but withdrawn social support. It’s beginning to seem like a key challenge for the next few years will be maintaining our humanity while we wrestle with the twin challenges of technology and dispersal.
