Michelle Johnston, a longtime management professor at Loyola, was preparing to publish her first book on new leadership models when the COVID pandemic inspired a rewrite that focused on building human connections in a hybrid workplace.
After identifying the rise of artificial intelligence as the next major challenge coming to the office, Johnston recently published her second book, “The Seismic Shift in You,” with co-author Marshall Goldsmith.
With advances in technology and remote work coinciding with rising rates of loneliness — linked to health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day — Johnston calls for leaders to focus less on control and more on maintaining connections.
Besides studying leadership and management through an academic lens, Johnston knows about it first-hand from real-world experience. As an executive coach and podcast host, she has worked with clients including Ochsner Health System, Entergy, the New Orleans Saints and Georges Enterprises, the parent company of The Times-Picayune and The Advocate.
In this week’s Talking Business, Johnston discusses her new book and how she teaches her clients to keep the teams in their workplace connected.
This interview has been edited for brevity.
What is your advice for how to connect in a hybrid or remote work environment?
What we’re seeing is, even in a hybrid environment, we need face-to-face time to build the connection, to build the trust that fuels the innovation, that fuels the productivity and the financial performance.
I advocate for, at least quarterly, off-sites. It’s really hard in these virtual meetings to go deep with connections. If you’re running big monthly meetings, try to get people in breakout rooms and say, “OK, I’m going to give you all a question.” Share each other’s stories: Where are you from? What’s your birth order? We’ve got to know each other’s stories first, because when you know somebody’s story, then it’s very hard to judge and assume the worst.
You can also begin with connection questions. Some people think it’s hokey, I believe that it is necessary. Share the agenda, pass it around from person to person each week. We have to run meetings differently. They’ve got to be more of a conversation, rather than talking at people.
How do accountability and connection-based leadership relate to each other?
I think they go hand-in-hand, because in order to hold each other accountable, you have to have open communication, you have to have dialogue, you have to have trust. You have to be able to lean in and have difficult conversations. You have to be comfortable with conflict.
Connection requires courage. It takes a lot of courage to lean in and have those delicate conversations, and when conflict arises, figure out how to resolve it, how to hold each other accountable.
Think about this: if you want to go super fast with your team, just barking at them and giving them orders and telling them to figure it out is not going to work. You have to spend a lot of time building that connection, getting to know each other as humans on a personal level. And I am not advocating being a therapist. I don’t want people to show up and talk about all their problems. If you want to build a team that is high-performing, spend time developing them together, so that we all get to know each other, who we are as humans, what our preferences are, how we work best, how we communicate best, what our background is. If you do all that up front, then you build that trust, then you go fast.
How does the lack of a shared reality, of being able to trust what you read or what you see, change the value proposition of one-on-one, individualized connections?
Social media makes you feel like you’re connected, and all of a sudden, you look up and it’s been 45 minutes and you’ve been scrolling and you’re like, “Oh, but I’m connecting.” But then the research is showing that it actually creates emptiness and anxiety.
Automation, AI, is going to help us immensely — it really will, if we use it the right way — it can do so much for us, and it also means we’re going to be more dependent on technology, on our computers, on our phones. I believe that productivity without connection equals emptiness. Make sure that we’re focusing on face-to-face when we can, meaningful connection, and then we’ll be happier, healthier, and everything else will fall in place.
Show me your calendar, and I will show you your priorities. It might make you really uncomfortable, because if the most important people in your life, personally and professionally, are not on your calendar, then business has taken over. And then you wake up, and years have gone by. You’re like, “Why haven’t I seen my family?” “Why haven’t I seen my best friends?” “Wait, I haven’t nurtured these relationships because it’s not on my calendar.”
Have you — either from students or from business leaders who you’re coaching — experienced a pushback to this philosophy?
Some leaders, in the very beginning, when I’ve worked with them, they’ll say, “Michelle, I lead finance. I’ve got all these agenda items, you’re telling me you want me to spend 15 minutes at the beginning of my meeting going around and asking my people on a scale of 1 to 10 how they’re doing?” I said, “Yes, try it out. Try it out for six months. I understand, and I appreciate your being honest that you think that you have too much to accomplish to actually ask your people how they’re doing on a scale of 1 to 10, but try it out.”
Every single one of them who’s tried it has come back to me and said, “You are absolutely correct. It works.” Because once you build that relationship, the team members know more about each other. We’re all human. We’re not just cogs in a wheel.
They’ve all come back to me and said, “Now we have a cohesive team who trust one another, who now collaborates well. They’re so much more productive. I can now retain my people. They’re more engaged.” Those are all the indicators of success. I tell my leaders: If you want to go fast and drive financial performance — who doesn’t, right? — then you have to start with the building blocks of connection.