Click Your Way to Success

In my experience, the most important factor for success in business is the ability to interact well with other people. Leadership skills, financial acumen, and technical expertise all matter a lot, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans without solid people skills.

The reality is none of us can be successful completely on our own. We need the help of other people — peers, staff, managers, vendors, or business partners — to successfully accomplish our tasks and goals.

Human relationships are more complicated than Wall Street financial schemes, but we often take interpersonal skills for granted. We rarely study them to the degree we study financial or technical skills. After all, we’ve been talking to people all our lives. We’re experienced. But I’ll argue there are subtleties that make all the difference, and they’re worth studying.

In my opinion, the best business book ever written is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie — and it’s actually not even classified as a business book. I’ve never read a better guide to the basics of interacting effectively with people.

Another book that sits nicely alongside the Carnegie classic on my bookshelf is Click: The Magic of Instant Connections by Ori and Rom Brafman. Click explores the factors or “accelerators” that exist when people “click” with each other. We’ve all had those instant connections with people in our lives, and those types of connections generally lead to powerful and productive relationships.

Key Accelerators from Click

Proximity

Simple physical proximity can make a huge difference in our ability to connect with others. A study of a large number of military cadets found that 9 out of 10 cadets formed close relationships with the cadets seated directly next to them in alphabetical seat assignments. Another study found that 40% of students living in randomly assigned dorms named their next-door neighbor as the person they most clicked with, but that percentage dropped in half when considering the student just two doors away. Maybe more startling, the students who lived in the middle of a hall were considerably more likely to be popular than those living at the end of a hall.

Why?

The authors explain that these connections are often driven by “spontaneous conversation…over time, these seemingly casual interactions with people can have long-term consequences.”

I think many of us have instinctively understood the value of placing working teams in close proximity to each other. I’ve always attributed that value to the working conversations that are overheard and allow various members of the team to better understand and communicate issues about the work. But maybe that close proximity is also allowing people to better connect with each other. Maybe those connections allow us to better relate to each other and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Looking back at my career, I can think of many instances where office moves have coincided with strengthening or straining my working relationships with people.

Proximity is more important than I ever thought. And so maybe that’s an argument for going back to the office. But there are plenty of great arguments for the value of remote work, so we need to find ways to intentionally create “virtual proximity” in remote and hybrid work environments. This could include virtual coffee breaks, online team-building activities, or even just allowing and encouraging chit-chat at the start of meetings. And we should also strongly consider dedicated in-person meet up events from time-to-time, with time specifically allotted for people to connect.

GitLab has created a handbook with lots of great ideas.

Resonance

Resonance “results from an overwhelming sense of connection to our environment that deepens the quality of our interactions.” Huh? For example, the book reports that we’re 30 times more likely to laugh at a joke in the presence of others than if we hear it alone. My friend and colleague Jeff Dwoskin moonlights as a stand-up comedian, and he once explained to me that the difference between a good comedy club and a bad comedy club is the arrangement of audience seating. When tables are close together, people laugh more. When there are lots of booths that separate the audience into tiny groups, it’s much harder to get a laugh and keep the funny going.

Many companies create resonance with open seating arrangements. No cubes. No walls. They say it’s a huge key to their success. Does that work for every working team in all situations? I doubt it. But certainly working environments have an impact on working relationships and their resulting productivity, and resonance is a concept worth considering.

Again, remote work presents some challenges to resonance. Ways to get there can be virtual events that people experience together. During the pandemic, my teams held monthly virtual meetings where we had guest speakers, watched TED talks, and even did virtual escape rooms. We took advantage of virtual breakout rooms to make sure there was live discussion (versus chat) as part of each session.

Similarity

“No matter what form it takes, similarity leads to greater likability…once we accept people into our in-group, we start seeing them in a different light: we’re kinder to them, more generous.”

Kinder. More generous. Those sound like good bases for effective working relationships. It’s amazing how finding common ground can bring teams closer and help them work more effectively together. Sure, those of us working for the same company in the same industry all have industry and company in common, but we all have stories where functions battle it out where function is a stronger bond than company.

Often it’s the more personal similarities that are more likely to bring people together. For that reason, we should encourage water cooler chats and other personal interactions in the workplace. Everything in moderation, for sure, but a little personal time can actually end up improving productivity by reducing stress and misinterpretations that lead to unproductive miscommunications. The book reports that a “Finnish health survey conducted on thousands of employees between 2000 and 2003 revealed that those employees who had experienced a genuine sense of community at work were healthier psychologically.”

To be clear, we also still desperately need diversity. Diversity in race, gender, age, cultural background and other forms of diversity bring different perspectives that help our teams grow and be more successful. But, maybe counterintuitively, I’ve found that the value of diversity is most successful when it’s fueled by points of similarity. Connecting with people through some shared common ground helps us appreciate their differences as opportunities for learning and growth, rather than seeing them as "other." This approach fosters a more inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and valued, leading to richer collaboration and innovation.

“Common bonds and that sense of community don’t just foster instant connections — they help to make happier individuals.” The Brafmans provide numerous examples of teams that performed significantly better than others primarily due to the interpersonal dynamics of their members. We simply cannot succeed in life without the support of other people. It’s worth taking the time to understand how to improve those relationships for the betterment of all parties. And pick up Click, it’s well worth the read.