Brief
Employees feel disconnected from work because they lack purpose, they feel lonely and they don’t believe their manager cares about them, write Michael Lee Stallard and Katharine P. Stallard. They offer three tactics for demonstrating this care and improving the overall culture, including establishing a formal mentoring program.
Insight
Do the people around you know that you are for them? Do they know whether you care about them, want them to be able to do their individual best, and will advocate for them?
Having this assurance promotes a feeling of connection. It goes a long way in establishing trust and an environment of psychological safety. But if they don’t know with certainty that you are for them, they may feel you are indifferent to them (which is disconnecting) or assume, rightly or wrongly, that you are against them (which is very disconnecting).
For a whole host of reasons, now is an important time for leaders who care about people to be sure that the message is being received loud and clear.
Why does it matter that people know you are for them?
The disconnection people are experiencing today is broader than loneliness, a point Noreena Hertz makes in her book “The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That’s Pulling Apart.” Here’s what she says (emphasis ours):
“Reshaped by globalization, urbanization, growing inequality and power asymmetries, by demographic change, increased mobility, technological disruption, austerity, and now by [the Covid-19 pandemic] too, I believe the contemporary manifestation of loneliness goes beyond our yearning for connection by those physically around us, our craving for love and being loved, and the sadness we feel from being bereft of friends.
It also incorporates how disconnected we feel from politicians and politics, how cut off we feel from our work and our workplace, how excluded many of us feel from society’s gains, and how powerless, invisible, and voiceless so many of us believe ourselves to be.
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