Making A Connection

So what does it mean to make a connection? In my mind it has everything to do with making other people feel like they matter. Making a connection with someone, or building a relationship, is not about what’s in it for me, but what I can do for them. As I’ve lead the Daybreak Online Team I’ve realized that building those relationships and making connections with my team members is way more challenging than I’d ever expected. You might wonder why, well here it is. The work we do on the Daybreak Online Team is purely behind the scenes. Granted hundreds of people across the globe will be exposed to our work but we will mostly never have any interaction with those people and while we are doing the work there is little interaction between team members. And this is one of the biggest hurdles of building relationships and connecting with the members of my team. I have had the privilege to make some connection with a couple of my people on my team either through the fact that one of them has been on my team for the past 4-6 years, and I’ve been in a small group with another of them. I really desire for people to enjoy being on the team and feel like they are making a real impact on people through the work that they do, but the reality of it is that this is only going to work for the right kind of people.

So what does this all mean, and what am I going to do about it? Well, as I see it this is going to be a work in progress. I’m trying to figure out what the secret sauce is for my team and how to bring in new people in the right way. We’ve started to use Slack as a way to communicate and get more dialog going within the team but time will tell if that is right for us or not. Will all of the busy schedules having actual facetime seems to be a pretty big challenge for the team right now. We might be trying to employ Skype or Google+ Hangouts as an alternative.