65. Ties That Bind: Why Remote and Hybrid Teams Need the Right Connection
20:57 Share

Hi, Matt here. I invite you to look into Stanford Continuing Studies. For over 20 years, I have taught in the program. Discover a diverse range of courses available both online and in person to anyone, anywhere in the world. Classes cover everything from fundamental business skills to the fascinating world of AI. This fall, join me for Communication Essentials for Work and Life, a new course designed to enhance and hone your communication skills in various situations.

Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. How we work, how we innovate, how we interact have all changed dramatically in the recent past.

Today, I'm excited to dive into learning how innovation and our new style of hybrid work interact. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I am very excited to chat with Glenn Carroll and Michael Arena.

Glenn is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford GSB. Glenn teaches leading through culture and is the co-author of Making Great Strategy, Arguing for Organizational Advantage. Michael Arena is a faculty member in Penn's Master's in Organizational Dynamics program.

Michael most recently served as the vice president of talent and development at Amazon Web Services, and he authored the book Adaptive Space, How GM and Other Companies Are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations.

Welcome, Glenn and Michael. Thanks for being here. I am looking so forward to our conversation. It's a pleasure to be here. Really looking forward to the conversation, Matt. Excellent. Let's get started. The pandemic caused a huge shift to virtual and hybrid work. You both, along with other colleagues, recently wrote a paper entitled The Adaptive Hybrid, Innovation with Virtual Work. Michael, what research question were you setting out to address with this work?

Yeah, it's really interesting, Matt. If you would have said pre-March 2020 that we would have all entered into this virtual experiment together and would have been

As productive, if not more productive in the virtual context, I think many managers and many of us who've studied social capital and connections would have laughed out loud. But it turns out that that is exactly what happened. Mostly productivity improved or at least remained the same for knowledge workers. But that led us really quickly to another question, a longer term question, which had much more to do with innovation.

Like, what will happen long term from an innovation standpoint as it relates to working virtually? And we know from previous research that that requires a different set of connections than being productive.

And it turns out those particular connections are very, very fragile. So it led us down this path of really trying to understand what might be happening with innovation longer term. And we started to really study the network patterns quite comprehensively to see what was emerging virtually during that period of time. And then we started to see some anecdotes. My favorite and most alarming was in the video game industry.

Just as the video game industry was at its height, all of our children were sent home and we were all sucking up bandwidth on our home internet systems and the kids wanted to be playing games because the educators hadn't caught up. We started to see launch delays in the video game industry.

And I think the number was there were 4x more delays in the virtual world than pre-COVID against the standard benchmark. And we just started to become suspicious. Are we still generating ideas at the same velocity? And are we able to integrate new solutions and new products and scale them on the back end? And that got, you know, Glenn and myself interested.

and really trying to dig deep into what might be happening with innovation. I have two teenage sons and they were very eager for new video game releases and who knew video games could inspire such interesting creative research. Glenn, in order to understand the adaptive hybrid work model that you all put forth, we really first need to understand the different stages of innovation. Can you explain the different stages and give us some insight into them?

Sure. So we use a fairly standard depiction of organizational innovation that has three steps. First step is what people call ideation, which is where you brainstorm and kick around ideas and come up with what you think is a good idea. That's usually a pretty unstructured process where you put people in a room and just try to get them to interact.

The second stage is what's often called incubation. And the incubation phase is when you've decided on one, two or three ideas and you're trying to put them in place in an actual market or organization and see how they perform and try to fine tune the way in which you're doing it so that it works the way you want and that the consumers understand it and react to it the way you think they should.

And then the third stage is if you've successfully incubated an idea, it's to bring it to scale. And bring it to scale means to bring it to the full organization and all of its markets, products, and services that are appropriate so that you can reap the benefits of the innovation in your regular performance.

So it's all about ideation, incubation and scale. Thank you for that, Glenn. Your model also looks at bonding and bridging. Can you help us understand how these two concepts interact with the stages of innovation? Sure. So we talk about what we call bonding ties and bridging ties, which are social connections among individuals.

And if you think about a group of individuals who are very closely connected to each other, meaning they have lots of different dimensions to their relationships and they interact with each other regularly and they kind of know what's going on. And there's a lot of feedback and reciprocation from that. That's a bonding situation. Those are bonding ties. People feel close together, feel like a family, feel like a team.

Bridging ties, on the other hand, are ties that stretch across vast parts of your social world, in this case, organizations. So a bridging tie would be someone in manufacturing might reach out to someone in marketing or in sales or something like that who they don't normally interact with, but they're bridging across lots of different groups and lots of different parts of the organization in order to communicate with each other.

Bridging ties tend to be much less frequent and much less intense, but are also important for innovation. And what we try to describe in the paper is the way I think most social scientists think

would think about how these networks interface with the different stages of innovation. In the first one, the ideation phase, you're talking about bringing together people from all different parts of the organization and having them interact with each other. And so they're actually bridging and connecting and making ideas flow from one part of the organization to another in ways that they might not normally. So the typical kind of interaction would be a water cooler conversation interaction

where you're talking about the Warriors game tonight and you happen to talk about where you're parking and that leads to a conversation about tires, let's say, and then about, you know, one thing leads to another. So, but people are connecting because they come from different worlds and they're bridging across different parts of the organization.

The second phase of innovation, the incubation phase, is when you're very focused and you've chosen an idea and you take your team and you say, we want to put this idea into place and try it out. And so the team is trying to be very focused, very efficient, and to try and do what they can to make it work. And so those are usually a team that works together a lot and the bonding ties there help them execute very effectively.

And then in the third phase, the scaling phase, the person or the team that's actually incubated the idea successfully tries to take it up to the larger part of the organization and usually needs help in terms of getting resources and getting people to give them access to different parts of the organization and markets that they don't normally have access to. And so those, again, involve bridging ties. But this time, rather than bridging lines,

laterally, as might be the case in ideation, we're just talking to people at the same level of the organization. In the scaling phase, usually are upward to people with authority who have resources and who could open up doors for you to get the thing in place. Wow. So it's quite a matrix that gets created here. And the way in which relationships and networking happens matters a lot, I can see, based on the different phases.

So Michael, I think we have all the pieces in place now. Can you elaborate for us on this adaptive hybrid work model that you have created and suggest the best ways we can optimize innovation in a hybrid world? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And really just to build upon what Glenn just went through, the research that we went out and embarked upon across multiple companies is

suggested to us that the type of social capital in a virtual world showed up differently. In other words, and I'll go way back to the beginning of our conversation, bonding social capital actually increased immediately into the pandemic. With our closest colleagues, it actually went up as much as 40%. Wow. With our more distant colleagues, there's been some research out there that said maybe at least an increase of 20%.

But that is also the same kind of social capital you would think about not only for incubation, but for productivity. So our hypothesis, and we've got since good substantiating evidence on this, was that productivity increased because our closest connections, Zoom is really good for bringing your five to seven closest colleagues together online.

And so we didn't miss a beat in the area of productivity. Turns out incubation was also positively affected during the initial stages of the pandemic. However, the opposite side of that are bridging connections that Glenn talked about dropped off radically, dropped off a cliff about 30% in literally the first few months, which is what

made us suspicious about can we continue to ideate across the organization as we've lost these bridging connections? And then with the video game industry, are we able to scale on the back end and synchronize these things up for formal endorsement

without the appropriate bridging connections. And that is essentially what the paper's about. I think a lot about Lee Fleming's work up at Harvard. What it takes to discover new ideas from a social network standpoint is the exact opposite of what it takes to build those ideas.

And that's the core premise of the research. We've got to think through very fluidly, what stage of work are we in as we're trying to innovate? Like, are we at the beginning stage of a new idea or new innovation? And do we need bridging connections? Or are we in the middle? Are we building? Or are we trying to scale? And the adaptive hybrid is basically suggesting

that we need to be much more adaptive in the way we think about hybrid work. It's perhaps the most foolish advice, in my opinion, I'm not going to speak for Glenn, although I believe he believes this as well, is to say, come back in the office two to three days a week. To me, that's like playing social lottery. You know, you increase your chances of connecting with people, but it's not very deliberate at all.

If you're not there when you need to be there with other teams that you're dependent on, you don't really increase your odds all that significantly. So what we're arguing for in the paper is an adaptive hybrid that says you've got to ask two core questions. What work stage are you in based on those three phases of innovation? And then secondly, how much social capital and what kind of social capital do you have stored up?

And our premise is based on those two questions, you may choose to work virtually because you've got stored up social capital or you may choose to come in the office, but doing it super deliberately with the other groups you need to interact with. The advice is to look at what's going on at a meta level to understand where you're at in terms of the process. And then to think about that social capital, the way in which we need to connect with people and leverage our social network at work.

to accomplish the goals. And in some ways, that sounds like a lot of extra work, but it sounds like it's work that's very well worth it because it allows you to then make sure you're maximizing for where you're at at that point in time. So besides the two questions that you posed, Michael, I'm wondering, are there other things that managers, leaders can be looking for to help maximize the likelihood that they're actually going to be successful innovating? Yeah.

Yeah, the questions matter immensely. I also think that there's not a prescription for this. Like the easy thing to do is to want to hardwire this and build a prescription. We've got to experiment our way here. The other practical advice I would give to leaders

is you got to use really high judgment and go run some experiments, use different interventions, decide when you're going to come in the office and which three teams you may pull together and which intervention will work best. And what I've seen a lot in businesses is also play with what virtual tools might work

The most practical advice is trust your instincts and use high judgment. And then the second one is experiment, experiment, experiment. It will be easy for Glenn and I and others to come out and say, you need this intervention or you need that intervention, but that may not work for your company. What we're really trying to challenge leaders to do is to use that high judgment and then experiment like crazy with the interventions that work most with their teams.

A big theme I'm hearing from what you and Glenn are talking about is this notion of we have to be flexible. Setting rigid guidelines and boundaries might work against innovation and more opportunistic types of interactions. I can't miss this opportunity to talk to Glenn and not bring up the topic of innovation.

authenticity. Authenticity is a topic that we've talked a lot about on this podcast, and it plays a large role, I believe, in communication and lots of other areas. So Glenn, I am curious to learn your thoughts about the role of authenticity in communication and how we can actively work to be more authentic. It's one of the first bits of advice most people receive when they come to their communication or somebody to help them with their communication. They say, OK, just be your authentic self. I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that?

So I think I have a pretty straightforward answer to your question, Matt. And my answer would be that someone is an authentic communicator when they are the same person in public speaking that they are in private. That is, you don't see a change in the character, the demeanor, or even the things the person says. They're really the same person. And I think if you say someone's an authentic communicator, that's a great compliment because it says that they're really natural when they're speaking in public.

And they're not going to tell you something different than they would have in private. Yeah, interesting. So being that same person speaking the same way. I don't know if you have any data on this, Glenn, but I'm just curious. When we all move to virtual communicating or communicating in an intermediated way, I think a lot of us became inauthentic just because we had so much to pay attention to. I mean, we've got all these volumes and buttons and all this. Do you have any instinct as to...

the difficulty that virtual communication had on authenticity or its impact on authenticity? So I don't have any data and I haven't seen any really good research on that. I mean, my impression is pretty similar to yours. I think that a lot of people became what I would consider much more artificial when they're online than they were in person.

On the other hand, you see the same thing, you know, when people get up and speak in person sometimes. It's not just a virtual setting where you see that. You think like, wow, that's a different person. I've had people say, well, I don't know. Just something happens and I become a different person when I'm speaking. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Some people are probably...

better communicators when they're doing that but it does make you wonder what's going on that makes a person change absolutely well maybe there's some research and collaboration that we can do on that because i'm fascinated by how the environment influences people's authenticity

Before we end, I'd like to ask both of you the same three questions I ask everybody who joins me. Are you guys up for that? Yeah, absolutely. Excellent. All right, we'll start with you, Glenn. If you were to capture the best communication advice you have ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be? So I'm going to sound like I'm pandering, but this is really true, Matt. So I was watching one of your videos and you were talking about people who got nervous when they speak.

Yeah. And your advice was just reflect at that moment and tell yourself, oh, that's just me being nervous. And in fact, you know, if I had known that when I was much younger, I think it would have helped me with a lot of anxiety I had in public speaking. It really is true. Once you just realize like this is a normal thing and this is still you, that it relaxes you entirely.

Pandering will get you everywhere, Glenn. No, I'm glad that that advice was helpful. And it's helpful to many of us to take a moment to just realize that anxiety is pervasive. In fact, it is the norm to not be nervous as the stranger of the situation. I'm glad that's helpful for you. And I hope it's helpful for others as well. Michael, I'm curious, who is a communicator that you admire?

and why? I think I'm going to say Mary Barra because I had the chance of working with Mary Barra as Glenn has while I was at General Motors. She's just a really unique communicator in ways that I admire tremendously. And she's super authentic, awesome listener, which I think is an underrepresented part of communicating, right? Just an incredible listener who draws other people in and then is, I actually think, quite masterful at synthesizing

what she just heard from many, many others. So for me, like when I'm thinking about leadership and communication, not standing on the stage and communicating, but leadership and communicating, she rises to the top to me. I love that I asked a question about a communicator and you immediately went to a leader who's very good at listening and synthesizing. We often forget that that's a critical part of communication. Glenn, I'd like to ask you the same question. Who is a communicator that you admire?

And why? Yeah, so I'm going to go in the other direction here. Somebody I don't know and I really only heard speak once, and that was on television. And that is Amanda Gorman. She's a young poet laureate. She read a poem at Joe Biden's inauguration. I mean, I remember watching it. She had so much confidence. And I was just amazed at her. She may be 21 years old. I was amazed at her ability to do this. And so it was a matter of her oration and not necessarily a two-way communication. But it was very, very powerful.

Absolutely. I was very moved by that as well. She's a very gifted communicator and was able in that moment to really bring, I think, a lot of people to that same conclusion you came to. Thank you. So, Michael, third question for you. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I'll get a little unconventional on this one, too. So in social science, there's something called the gossip and reputation cycle.

And it's basically how a message will be picked up and carried, if you want to think about it, virally across the network. For me, I think about it this way. It's got to be short. It's got to be a snippet because we communicate to others in snippets. It won't carry if it's not short. It's got to be compelling. Like if it's not meaningful, no one's going to repeat it and it's not going to travel across the network. And probably most importantly is it's got to be interesting to the person you're communicating to.

I'm never going to repeat something that someone else says if I can't find something in it that was interesting to me or relevant to the audience is another way of thinking about that. Those are the three things I think about is short, meaningful, and interesting to the audience or the individual that you're communicating with.

Who knew we could learn so much from gossip in terms of what makes for effective communication, but certainly being concise, making sure it's meaningful and interesting and relevant make a big difference. I certainly want to make sure that the work that you two do is not seen as gossip, but is seen as very critical. And I've really enjoyed the conversation. Your adaptive hybrid model works.

I think is really informative for all businesses to think about as we navigate our way through this. And really your mantra of experiment, try, learn how to make this work for an individual organization really makes a lot of sense. I thank you very much for your time and for your insights. Thank you. Thank you, Matt.

You've been listening to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. This episode was produced by Michael Reilly, Jenny Luna, and me, Matt Abrahams. Find more resources and join in the conversation by searching LinkedIn for Think Fast, Talk Smart. Download and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts.

Hi, Matt here. Before we jump in, I wanted to let you know about three unique executive education programs offered to senior-level business leaders by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Executive Program in Leadership, the Emerging CFO Program, and the Director's Consortium Program are

are all being hosted here on Stanford's beautiful campus in the next few months, crafted with proven strategies for success and filled with diverse leaders from around the globe, taught by many of the guests you've heard on Think Fast, Talk Smart. Apply today at grow.stanford.edu slash upcoming to join us.