The Power of Touch

What do we say when someone handles a task in an annoyingly perfunctory way? There's a lot of insight hidden in the dismissive phrase: "He phoned it in." If you've been maximizing your digital reach -- and can't understand why your effectiveness isn't rising as fast -- it's time to take a fresh look at how you're connecting with people.

The central insight: turn up the intensity of your communications strategy as your goals become more ambitious. When your goals are small, settling for quick and casual may suffice. I spent much of last week making incremental progress on a big to-do list via the wonders of Skype, email, LinkedIn InMail and many more such tools. You've probably been there, too.

Spend too much time communicating via such high-volume, remote tools, though, and it's easy to lose sight of their limitations. Some things in life are too important for the phone-it-in treatment. (This essay by language columnist Ben Zimmer provides a very entertaining look at how the phone-it-in idiom has spread since the 1940s.)

As entrepreneur Jason Langheier observes, “selling and fundraising are in-person sports." He runs Zipongo, a San Francisco company that delivers healthy-eating tips to corporate customers and their employees. In a cluttered society with information overload, Langheier observes, "the only way to break through is by looking people in the eye."

Teaching is an in-person sport, too -- especially if you're trying to accomplish something transformational. Lots of the world's top professors now offer their courses online, for free, yet completion rates can be as low as 6.5%. Watching a lecture online is a bit like gazing at an airplane flying overhead. It's moving fast. You aren't. Your eyes track the plane for a little while; once it's gone, your attention turns to something else.

Bear in mind that full-time students at U.S. community colleges achieve graduation rates as high as 57%, even though facilities tend to be bare-bones, instructors overworked, and students encumbered with non-academic burdens that make it hard to focus exclusively on school. Get everyone in the same room, and the spark of learning is more likely to take hold.

Last week, I was chatting with Josue Quinones, who provides academic counseling at New York State's Binghamton University. Many of the students he works with are the first in their family to attend college. They don't arrive with the support networks their more prosperous peers enjoy. Yet Quinones, who was such a student himself a dozen years ago, shows them how to succeed in college anyway.

To see what Quinones does right, take a look at the video of this short talk he delivered earlier this year in Montreal. He focuses on the surprising power of high fives, hugs and handshakes -- all of which are easy to deliver in person and impossible to replicate from afar. His message: "With something as simple as a touch, you can boost someone's confidence, improve their mood, and increase their chances of success."