Connection and Direction - A Powerful Combination

Earlier today, I connected with Vanessa Mullen at the appropriately named ‘Be Challenged’ [almost every single day now they’re curating and creating superb engagement activities at conferences].

“Oh yes,” she said, “Conferences are back big time!” And she went on to give me a bunch of stats (like, “our team members have doubled”) to illustrate the point. “And the connection and engagement is just superb,” she concluded.

Hold that thought.?

And contrast it with this thought stream from a report last week from?Gallup:

“For months, economists have debated the kind of recession the U.S. would slide into after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates. But what they missed is that the country is already in a recession --?not an economic recession, but an emotional one…”

“Coinciding with the rise of quiet quitting was a four-percentage-point decline in?Gallup’s measure of U.S. employee engagement. Four points might not seem significant, but imagine if unemployment increased four points -- it would make more headlines than inflation…”

“And declining engagement has financial consequences. Organizations with declining engagement see decreases in productivity, customer loyalty and profitability; they also see higher absenteeism, turnover and shrinkage.”

It’s like rowing a boat isn’t it? As I pointed out in my recent ‘Time’s UP!’ book (co-written with?Ron Baker?and published by?Wiley), if we’re a team rowing a boat from A to B, we want everyone heading to B. Sadly, using?Gallup’s?figures, only a staggering 32% are doing that. 56% simply have their oars in the water. Worse still, 12% are actively rowing the wrong way!

So …. back to?Be Challenged. How do they get full engagement — everyone rowing in the same direction, putting in more than 100%, and enjoying the process?

According to Vanessa they do it by locking onto a basic human trait:?we’re all at our best when we’re giving. And that doesn’t mean giving money either. It means giving of ourselves just like what we do when we help the proverbial ‘little old lady’ across the road.

One of?Be Challenged’s?most popular activities uses that trait in the name: it’s called ‘Go-Give.’

Participants in teams of up to 8 have to work their way from A to B by making it to certain destinations along the way. At each one of those destinations is a task they have to complete. Each task (and there may be 20 of them in each 'journey’) is linked through the Global Impact-Creation Initiative, B1G1, to creating positive impacts in the world. Here’s a partial list of options from a recent Conference…

Giving:

• 1 day of food to a survivor of gender-based violence in Kenya;
• 21 days of learning tools to nursery school children in Ethiopia;
• 1 piece of educational material to seriously ill children in Australia;
• 2 days of fruits to malnourished children in Moldova;
• 2 days of medical support to children in need in Ukraine;
• 1 nourishing meal to a child in need in New Zealand;
• 1 square meter of rainforest protection in Australia

Or Planting:

• 1 tree to save orangutans in Indonesia

All of these micro-impacts are then melded together to create a sense — a very correct sense too — of massive impacts being made, adding enormously to the sense of achievement.

And because of the way?Be Challenged?does it, this sense of achievement and engagement is carried back to the offices and workplaces of the participants.

Of course, that basic human trait we mentioned earlier (each one of us is at our best when we’re giving) doesn’t need a conference to kickstart it.

It all comes back to creating projects where each one of us is working together with others towards a destination. And when we can link that outcome to things inherently bigger than ourselves, great things happen. There’s a much greater sense of meaning when this happens.

Thinking this way gives us all a great tool to get everyone rowing in the same direction as well as celebrating when we arrive AND surviving the challenges along the way.

Brené Brown put it beautifully and powerfully in her first TED talk — one that she expected 100 or so people to watch, but now viewed by in excess of 60 Million people:

“Connection is why we're here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.”

It’s so true isn’t it? And more than ever now, we’re learning that real connections (as opposed to Zoom-type connections) are so much more needed and so much more powerful. [And by the way, that’s not a ‘plug’ for the ‘let’s all get back in the office every day’ movement. Products like ro.am are making great strides at connecting us in different ways now — ways that really do connect.]

When we have what Stephen Covey referred to as our ‘North Star’ — that ‘something bigger than us’ we inherently connect more deeply with ourselves and therefore with others who share that greater sense of purpose.

When we combine connection with direction …. magic happens.