by Nick Morgan
+ –
viewpoint, even if I disagree with it.
Score two points for a plus next to questions 1, 2, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, and 25. Score one point for a minus next to questions 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, and 21.
Scores:
30–40: You are highly empathetic. You will be able to fine-tune your empathy for the virtual world with ease.
20–29: You are moderately empathetic. You will sometimes find showing empathy in the virtual world difficult.
10–19: You have weak empathy. You will regularly make empathy misjudgments in the virtual world.
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0–10: You have an empathy deficit. The virtual world will be an empathy minefield for you.
The virtual safe space
Every important digital connection—meetings, negotiations, and the like—needs to conclude with a time-limited, curated, virtual safe space, where participants both get and use the time to state their emotional reaction to the outcomes of the discussion.
As the leader, you begin the exchange by stating a real emotional truth you’re feeling in the moment, and you give everyone else the chance to do the same.
Assign an MC or chair for regular meetings For your regular virtual staff meetings or ongoing virtual meetings that take place online, assign one person the role of MC, or chair. His or her job is to monitor the meeting in three ways. First, the MC begins by asking about everyone’s emotional state—“How is everyone today?”—and then getting specific answers from all the participants. Next, the MC monitors the meeting in terms of participation. The research shows that equal participation increases satisfaction with the outcome, so the MC’s job is to enforce equal participation. “Let’s pause here for a moment and check in with Chris. We haven’t heard from him in a while. Chris, the floor is yours for the next sixty seconds. What’s your take on the proceedings?” Finally, the MC needs to check in with everyone at the end of the meeting to ascertain the outcomes, both emotionally and intellectually.
“What do you take away from today’s meeting, and how do you feel about it?”
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64 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications CHAPTER SUMMARY
• The online workplace—phone calls, online meetings, and so on—are emotionally stunted, and many problems stem from the inability of humans to get unconscious emotional feedback online, leading to a lack of empathy.
• Our physical and mental experiences are deeply interconnected.
• Our attitudes, emotions, and intentions are mostly unconscious.
• The physical experience opens us up to the mental, rather than the other way around.
• We embody our emotions.
• Our attitudes, emotions, and intentions are profoundly communal and tribal.
• Online business relationships typically have three stages, with a final, wind-down phase.
• In the virtual world, compelling business stories are even more important for engaging your customers, clients, and other audiences.
• Your online presence always needs to meet four criteria: authenticity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and consistency.
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3.
THE LACK oF CoNTRoL
FoR BETTER oR WoRSE, yOUR
LIFE oNLINE IS PUBLIC
In our real, physical lives, we accept that people close to us change their minds and suffer bad moods—but in the virtual world, we’re much less likely to accept this kind of natural inconsistency. We hold others to rigid standards of behavior and are much less forgiving. In virtual space, this double standard is particularly compelling. If you behave badly, it’s because you’re a troll, and your mother and her mother before you, back a thousand generations. These feelings are not logical, but such is the nature of virtual relationships. Lacking emotional depth, we substitute brittle, intellectual standards. Forgiveness is a word lacking in the digital vocabulary.
This chapter discusses two not-quite-contradictory things.
First, it offers some implications of, and necessary responses to, that rigid double standard. And second, it makes a plea that we all take a deep breath and try to relax the double standard just a bit. For the sake of our sanity. For the sake of all those trolls out there. And for the sake of the children, who suffer enormously from online bullying and need our help.
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66 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Underlying each of these issues is the fundamental one of control—of what is said about us and others online. We can understand this loss of control whenever our own digital lives are concerned, but we have a hard time extending the same digital flexibility to others.
Our standards are very high online—
when it comes to everyone else
If the design team delivers late once, we don’t find the behavior understandable, because we’re unaware or dismissive of the brutal cold snap that made travel tough and work difficult for a week. The team members’ jokes about the bad weather fall flat on the rest of the team, which is based in a warmer climate. It just sounds as if they’re suddenly not taking this important project seriously enough.
What does this unconscious double standard do to communication within a team or an organization? Why does this desire for others to play by our rigid rules make it much harder for us to be forgiving of normal human failings in the digital environment? Why do we all become inhuman caricatures of ourselves online?
We need to develop a personal rule book for online communication to save much misunderstanding, miscommunication, and heartache. For ourselves, thinking of the other members of our team, the people in our company, our customers, stakeholders, the public—all the people we might have to interact with—
we need to become rigorously consistent or expect that at some point our inconsistencies will be pointed out to us bluntly and unforgivingly.
And for all of us, let’s realize that we do have a double standard. Let’s remember the Golden Rule. Let’s stop judging others Chapter_03.indd 66
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quite so harshly. And let’s put the human emotions of understanding, acceptance, and charity back into the online world.
Until that golden day arrives, however, if you’re going to work and play in the online world, then you need to develop a few online consistency muscles. First, the persona.
What’s your online persona?
The need for consistency begins even before you deliberately communicate with others. What’s your online persona? It’s time to google yourself if you haven’t done so recently. Go past the first page, and study thoroughly what’s out there, what kind of person the results delineate, and what relationship this bears to your desired persona.
By 2018, “right to be forgotten” rules were gathering adher-ents in some jurisdictions, but for most of us in most places, the memory of the internet is long.1 The answer to this problem of the long life of bad news—if it’s a problem for you—is not to try to have the record expunged, but rather to drown out the old bad with the good new. Your new persona can find digital immortal-ity by simply being more recent and more plentiful than any old one. So very few of us read past the first page that it’s a relatively simple process to scrub your digital persona clean of anything you don’t like. Just put out there what you do want to see.
Now take it a step further. Think of yourself as a brand, with a need to be consistent online. Everyone’s experience of you needs to be the same, and it needs to be clear, across all the various places that images and information about you can be found.
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any other platforms you’ve inhabited, as well as your website if you have one—what
do they say about you? What persona do they present? Is it a consistent, fathomable human being?
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68 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Then think, What are your values? You might publish an online values statement to make those clear. People tend to take at face value what you say about yourself, so make your statement in a way that is consistent with who you are and who you want to be seen as.
Now, if your immediate reaction is that a personal brand is something you don’t need and don’t want, that it’s for someone with a much higher profile to worry about, like a celebrity, that’s fine; you can skip most of the rest of this chapter.
But you put a great deal of effort already into your work and personal lives, dressing the part, acting consistently, behaving according to norms that make sense to you. Why wouldn’t you also take control of your online life and make a similar effort?
If you don’t, the internet will do it for you. And that’s fine, unless its near-perfect memory for those embarrassing spring break pics is something you wish had been forgotten. If transparency, control, and consistency in the various parts of your life are important values for you, then read on.
Creating a personal value statement online A beautiful example of this kind of transparency, control, and consistency is Chris Palmer, American University’s Distinguished Film Producer in Residence.2 As an environmental activist, he founded American University’s Center for Environmental Filmmaking at the School of Communications. He is the president of the MacGillivray Freeman Films Educational Foundation and has produced over three hundred hours of original programming for TV and the IMAX film industry.
His films have been broadcast on Animal Planet, the Disney Channel, PBS, and TBS.
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His personal mission statement, published on his website, runs to several pages, and he assigns himself seven roles in life.
The statement is ambitious, thoughtful, impressive, and, quite frankly, a bit intimidating. Here’s the first paragraph of the 2,500-word statement:
I want to be remembered by my family, friends, and colleagues as a person grounded in decency, simple goodness, infectious vitality, and inspiring enthusiasm; as someone with a lasting and wonderful marriage, a great sense of humor, and a strong work ethic; as a man who made his role and responsibilities as a father and grandfather one of his highest priorities; as a person who committed himself to learning and education and who pursued his goals with passion; and as a man who left the world a better place.3
To better understand the purpose and process of this personal mission statement, I asked Palmer what his inspiration was for creating the statement and putting it online. His answer surprised me: “When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I was roiled by moods of despair, overwhelm, rancor, ennui, and confusion. In an effort to find some peace and purpose, it occurred to me to that articulating a vivid description of the life I wanted to lead might help me sort things out and find an inner tranquil-ity. It took me years of effort to finally create a personal mission statement that inspired me when I read it and that I was willing to commit to.”
I asked him about people’s reaction to the mission statement.
He responded, “A few people think I’m excessively serious and even eccentric, but most folks, after reading it, immediately see how it can offer a clarifying vision for one’s life and give a person more purpose and meaning.”
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70 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications An online mission statement can change your life The proof of the concept is in the results, so I asked Palmer what has happened as a result of his creating and publishing a personal mission statement. “It has transformed my life,” he said.
“I use it to guide my daily activities. Instead of confusion, I have clarity. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I feel in control. Instead of ennui, I have a purpose.”
And what about his online life—how has Palmer’s online life changed as a result? Palmer said, “People find it online and are intrigued and inspired by it. They write to me for advice and guidance. I give regular talks and presentations on how to live a fulfilling and successful life. About two years ago, I created a new class at American University, where I teach, called Design Your Life for Success. There is high demand to get into the class. One reason for that is because many students worry about how to make sense of their lives and how to lead a life that is meaningful and worthwhile. Rowman & Littlefield published my related book, Now What, Grad? Your Path to Success After College. My online life has been greatly enriched by all this work.”
If a well-thought-out mission statement seems like a lot of work, it is. But for many people, it beats the alternative, which is to let the rest of the world control the picture of you and develop an opinion of you from online trolling or indifference. Neither picture is liable to be very flattering, after all. And a mission statement is how you can restore the control to your online persona and life that the internet, simply by functioning as a giant recorder for almost everything that happens now, has taken away from you—whether you noticed or not.
Thinking about this work strategically, next you need to develop a platform based on your area of interest and your Chapter_03.indd 70
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brand—a platform that like-minded people can respond to and comment on—to help you get your message out. The platform might ultimately take the form of a website, where you have the most control. In the short run, you’ve probably already created something on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or all those and some other platforms besides.
Focus on your message, not yourself
It’s not really about you—if you do it right. It’s about your message. That’s why people will respond positively and help you develop that persona. They will comment and further your point of view because they care about your idea too. Get the word out, and create ways for the world to join you in the cause you care about.
Even if that cause is simply you because you’re thinking about your next job, you still need to get the word out. Don’t you think that the first thing a prospective employer will do when thinking about hiring you is google you?
But let’s keep it simple. Never mind the website; if that’s too much work, you are probably already on Facebook. Think about the difference between a Facebook page for an acquaintance who sends out frequent updates and a page that no one, including the creator, ever visits. What impressions do you form about each person?
You look to the first person for what’s going on—and, more importantly, his or her reaction to it. That person becomes a trendsetter for your friends and the person’s other friends, and for the internet as a whole—which is to say, the world. If the individual focuses on particular ideas, memes, or issues, you’ll get into the habit of looking to this friend’s site regularly to understand the trending points of interest.
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72 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Of course, there’s always the danger that this quasi-public friend will go overboard on an issue and jam your mental inbox—
and everyone else’s—with too much information about that issue or about themselves. Then you’ll quickly tire of the perspective and you may even block or commit online murder: unfriend the person.
The risks of overexposure are real. And underexposure as well. Getting the balance right needs to be part of your plan for your persona and the concepts you want to hold forth on.
Get the balance right
Once you’ve thought through the ideas you wish to represent and worked through some of these other issues, dig into the process a little deeper. Can people easily find you? When they do find you, what do they see? Do they see a professional
website that fits with your personal brand, that makes it easy for them to connect with you, and that continually updates with fresh content? If not, well, you’ve got some work to do.
And if you hope to be more than a worker bee, then begin to think about developing a voice—a strong point of view on whatever subject you care about. Once you start to develop your point of view, think about press mentions and other search results. Will people searching for you see that you’re mentioned in media stories and blog posts related to your field? If not, get to networking.
You get there by creating content and putting it out in some form that makes sense to you and to your field. Focus on the social media you understand best, but make sure you have an active online presence. The alternative is a lack of control of your online life.
You’ll have to take what’s given to you—and you may not like it.
Moreover, you need to take the control even further if you have a passion to make your mark in the world. Create a Facebook fan page, start your blog and contribute regularly to it, post some Chapter_03.indd 72
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YouTube videos in your channel, put your slides online, create a pdf of your press kit—do whatever feels most natural to you to get started. Try to set a regular posting schedule that you can stick with, and then stick with it.
Stuck for ideas? Use your one big idea as a lens and look at the world through it—always. Every moment becomes an opportunity for a new insight, a new data point, a new addition to your bank of stories and wisdom. If everyone’s talking about the latest celebrity scandal, see if you can come up with a take that relates back to your big idea. Don’t force it, but do look at the headlines with your big idea in mind.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed online, focus Whatever you’re passionate about, that’s what you have to find—
everywhere. Remember the old saw “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Well, you’re now a hammer with one or (at most) a few nails. If you’re interested in leadership, then every news item becomes a potential blog post about leadership. If you care about technology, then not just every new product announcement, but also every new psychological study about human behavior (for example), becomes grist for the mill. If achievement is your thing, then you need to see its presence or absence everywhere. That’s how you keep your expertise alive and fresh. You’ve got to be scanning the universe constantly.