We are more connected and lonelier than ever. That paradox is shaping not just our personal lives, but our workplaces, our leadership, and our long-term well-being. And if we don’t address it intentionally, loneliness becomes more than a social issue; it becomes a business risk.
Today, welcome back Dr. Tracy Brower, who has spent her career studying exactly this intersection of community, happiness, and the future of work.
Listen in as we unpack the epidemic of loneliness, the ROI of community in the workplace, and how leaders can balance the human need for connection with the flexibility employees have come to expect. Tracy also shares practical ways to create the conditions for belonging and meaningful relationships without manufacturing culture or mandating connection.
Finally, we explore the power of mentorship and social capital, why diversity strengthens our communities when built with intention, and how even introverts benefit from thoughtful connection. This is a conversation about designing work and leadership around what humans actually need to thrive.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- Why loneliness is so prevalent, despite how digitally connected we now are.
- How work can be part of the solution to the loneliness epidemic.
- Building communities with intention.
- Thoughtful connection, for both introverts and extroverts.
- How to balance the need for human connection and the flexibility of hybrid work environments for leaders.
“You won’t be purely happy if everybody’s like you; your best happiness and well-being come when your network is about 50/50 – 50% who are more similar to you, 50% who are different from you.” — Dr. Tracy Brower
Episode References:
- Book: Critical Connections: Build Relationships and Harness the Power of Community in Work and Life: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/critical-connections-tracy-brower-9781394362264
The Empathy Edge podcast:
- Dr. Tracy Brower: The Secret to Happiness at Work
- Neil Miller: How to Make Hybrid Work WORK!
- Jessica Swank: How Box Navigates the New World of Work
- Shasta Nelson: Why Successful Leaders Encourage Work Friendships
About Dr. Tracy Brower, PhD: Author, Critical Connections, The Secrets to Happiness at Work, Bring Work to Life
Dr. Tracy Brower is a PhD sociologist studying community, happiness, and the future of work and life. She is a Global 50 Thinker and the award-winning author of three books: Critical Connections, The Secrets to Happiness at Work, and Bring Work to Life. She is the vice president of workplace insights with Steelcase and a senior contributor to Forbes and Fast Company. She is a Top 101 Experience and Engagement Influencer, and her work has been translated into 25 languages, while her TEDx talk has been viewed 8.6 million times.
Connect with Tracy:
Website: tracybrower.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tracybrowerphd
Instagram: instagram.com/tlb108
TikTok: tiktok.com/@tracybrowerauthor
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:03
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. We’re more connected than ever and lonelier than ever. That paradox is shaping not just our personal lives, but our workplaces, our leadership, and our long-term well-being. And if we don’t address it intentionally, loneliness becomes more than a social issue, it becomes a business risk. My guest today, Dr. Tracy Brower, has spent her career studying exactly this intersection of community, happiness, and the future of work. Tracy is a sociologist, a global 50 thinker, and the award-winning author of three books: Critical Connections, her latest one, the secrets to happiness at work, which she spoke about on this show before, and bring work to life. She’s Vice President of Workplace Insights at Steelcase, a senior contributor to Forbes and Fast Company, and a top 101 experience and engagement influencer. Her work has been translated into 25 languages, and her TEDx talk has been viewed more than 8.6 million times. In our conversation, we unpack the epidemic of loneliness, why it persists in a digitally connected world, and why work is uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. We talk about the real ROI of community in the workplace, and how leaders can balance the human need for connection with the flexibility employees expect in hybrid environments. Tracy shares practical ways to create the conditions for belonging and meaningful relationships without mandating connection or manufacturing culture. We also explore the power of mentorship and social capital. Why diversity strengthens our communities when built with intention, and how even introverts benefit from thoughtful connection. This is a conversation about designing work and leadership around what humans actually need to thrive. She shared so much good stuff. Take a listen. Welcome once again to The Empathy Edge, Tracy Brower. I’m so excited to have you back again after a few years to talk about your new book, Critical Connections and the importance of community and our ability to interact with love and kindness with each other, so welcome to the show. Oh,
Dr. Tracy Brower 03:03
thank you. I am delighted to be here. Can’t wait for our conversation. Thank you.
Maria Ross 03:07
So, for I’m going to link to your the past episode that you did with us a few years ago, but for folks who don’t know, add some color around your bio that we just heard. How did you get into this work of writing about happiness and community and all of these things as a vice president within an organization.
Dr. Tracy Brower 03:26
Well, yeah, those are good questions. I mean, writing is my happy hobby, so that’s part of how I think and how I process. But my first book, Bring Work to Life, was kind of about my world, right? Like, I was at school, I was working, I was threading the needle with children and husband and all the wonderful family things, so that was about alternative ways to think about work-life balance, and in that process I realized how unhappy people were with work and how we could really create the conditions for happiness at work, so that was kind of a natural evolution, and then researching the secrets to happiness at work, there are lots of elements of how we create the conditions for happiness, and one big giant variable is connection and community, and there’s just so much research and so much opportunity today, because people are so lonely and we’re so disconnected, so that was a natural evolution as well, in terms of critical connections and how critical they really are.
Maria Ross 04:26
I love it, and I know we’re going to talk about some examples you’ve experienced in your own work life around the importance of connection. Why do you think? I mean, I know lots of people have lots of different theories about the fact that we’re so connected and things are so transparent as a society, you can quote unquote make friends with someone on the other side of the world. I have partners I’ve worked with for years that I’ve never met in person because they’re in another country or they’re on another continent. So, given that the internet and social media has opened up our world to make more connections, what. In your view, is the reason that we’re so lonely,
Dr. Tracy Brower 05:02
right? We’re so lonely for a few different lots of reasons, but I kind of boil it down to three primary reasons. One is that we have empty calories, I think, in terms of a lot of our ways that we connect, right. We have 1000s of connections on LinkedIn or other social media, but we may not have somebody that we really, really trust to call when we really, really need, need help, right? I think of it as empty calories. It’s sort of like I can eat candy corn for dinner. Candy corn is very polarizing. Yeah, I’m somebody who flies candy corn
Maria Ross 05:33
candy corn, so I’m pro candy corn. Yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Tracy Brower 05:36
It’s you can eat dinner every night with candy corn and die of malnutrition, right? Right, empty calories. So, I think social media is part of the reason that we feel so disconnected and isolated, because we’re spending time there instead of spending time in real life. It takes up the time that we would be creating real relationships. Another really critical issue is that we have elevated convenience over connection, we don’t talk to the barista, we order on the app. We don’t talk to the checkout person, we get the delivery at our door. We don’t talk to the person at the hotel who checks us in, we use our mobile key. We can go through large swaths of our day and never interact, and we need those superficial interactions for well-being and happiness, ironically, and so that has really shifted and makes us feel more isolated. And then work has shifted so much as well. We know that hybrid work is here to stay. Lots of research, including research from University of Chicago and Stanford in conjunction, demonstrate that we’ve been on a trajectory for remote work for years, and then hockey stick growth right during the pandemic, but now it will continue to some extent, and so as we have less opportunity for connection just in our day-to-day life in society, work becomes even more important as a connection point, and we have more disconnection in the way that we’re working, so those three elements – social media, the convenience over connection, in the way technologies changed our relationships, and the way that our work is shifting – all of those contribute to isolation and loneliness.
Maria Ross 07:14
Yeah, and I know we were talking before we were recording about the whole shift of going back to the office and back to work, and I mentioned to you, I see both sides to that. Right, we discovered in the pandemic, because we had to, that there’s a variety of variety of ways we can innovate, and we can be productive, and for some people, remote work and hybrid work works better for their lives, whether it’s anything from their own family situations, or caregiving situations, or own preferences, neurodiversity – all of these things contribute to them being able to be productive in the workplace, and hybrid and remote work has opened up that talent pool for us, right? But at the same time, as an extrovert myself, I also understand the desire and the need to be in person, and that the serendipitous moments that happen that really create the bonds of a team happen when we’re all in the same place. Now, again, I will argue out of out of either side of my mouth, depending on who I’m talking to, especially with leaders who simply want to mandate return to office because they’re too scared to figure out how to make hybrid work right, so that’s a different thing of you’re just leading with fear versus curiosity on how we can make this work. What do you think is the balance of that flexibility for people based on their own personal preferences, circumstances, neurodivergence needs at home and the need for community and connection in proximity to each other.
Dr. Tracy Brower 08:47
Yeah, there’s the
Maria Ross 08:48
balance.
Dr. Tracy Brower 08:49
I think balance is absolutely the key word. There’s actually really great research on more flexibility drives better performance and even better discretionary effort. We want to be treated like grown-ups. We want as much flexibility as possible. Not all jobs lend themselves to more flexibility, of course. When we can, when we can offer it, it’s a really good idea for people and for the business. And I think we really need to work hard to create places that people want to be. I was with a senior-level designer in Toronto, a couple of weeks ago, and she said, I want to design spaces that make people want to put down their devices, isn’t cool. I just love
Maria Ross 09:30
that. We need more of that, please. I know, right.
Dr. Tracy Brower 09:32
So, I think it really is about creating places that people want to be, and then the people attract us and other people, we want to learn from each other. We want to get career growth. We want to make friends at work, even if we’re not BFFs. We want to feel that collegiality. In fact, we know statistically that youngest generations are some of the generations who want to be in the office most. Interesting example. Well, there was an organization, and they were asking people to come into the office, and so what was happening is people were saying, you know, I’m not sure this is worth my commute, I get here and there’s nobody else here, and what they did is they figured out a way that they could share people’s schedules more openly. I mean, there was still privacy. I have an afternoon appointment on Thursday, that’s none of anybody else’s business, right. There were still privacy, but there was more transparency among schedules and more coordination, and so when people were able to come to the office and be with their people, it made all the difference. So it wasn’t just being in the office for the great office environment, it was being in the office in synchronization, right, in terms of schedules, so we could connect and do the things that we want to do together, and then be planful about the things that we might do away from the office, but I love that example of how they, how they figured out that that was the issue.
Maria Ross 10:56
Well, and that’s the experimentation that needs to take place. A while back, I interviewed Jessica Swank, who is the CHRO at Box, and they were talking about, we’re figuring this out, we’re trying different things, and we’re getting feedback from people in real time. Anyone that pretends to have it figured out doesn’t have it figured out. But that was one of the things they learned was, you know, you say blanketly, you need to spend two days a week in the office. What if the two days I go, the rest of my team isn’t there. What’s the point, right? And so then they experimented with, and them, and many other organizations experimented with, like, okay, Tuesdays and Thursdays everybody’s in the office, so you know if you go, it’s going to be worthwhile, and you still get three days a week that you can be flexible in your life and your schedule. So finding ways to do that, and also to your point, I love the word planful, right? This idea of being very intentional about it. I spoke with someone years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic, Neil Miller, who was an expert in hybrid work, and he was talking about how to make remote work work, and one of the things he talked about was we need to stop believing that it’s every meeting together or no meetings together, so what are the ones where we really need the proximity? What are the ones where we really need to look at each other’s eyes and be able to spend the time? Well, it’s not the weekly status meeting, right, but it is the maybe quarterly strategic planning meeting, so be discerning about which meetings you’re making people come together as a community, and you know this doesn’t even get into the issue of, you know, companies spending money on rent and spending money on commercial space, and I’m just talking about the productivity element of it, of you know, there’s there are different models that people are trying in order to accommodate this new way, and something you said earlier really stuck with me. This idea, and I’ve been saying this for years. The move towards a more human workplace culture was already afoot before the pandemic. The pandemic just accelerated it, so these trends that we saw around flexible work, remote work, you know, more care at work different types of benefits, those were all bubbling under the surface, but it wasn’t until we had to that company started looking at this as a way to survive.
Dr. Tracy Brower 13:10
Yes, so absolutely,
Maria Ross 13:11
that’s the, I mean, I guess the silver lining of the pandemic is it accelerated some of that conversation.
Dr. Tracy Brower 13:17
Yeah, for sure, and I mean companies should create great conditions for work, for people to feel fulfilled, for them to perform well, for them to get a sense of esteem, for them to connect. Those are the right things to do for people. Period. End of sentence,
Maria Ross 13:32
right?
Dr. Tracy Brower 13:32
And when you do the right thing for people, it’s the right thing happens for the business as well. So you can, you can choose your reason, right? I had, I had the most interesting conversation with somebody. It was in the session, and we were talking about the importance of connection, and I had a slide about the payoffs, the business payoffs for connection. There’s actually some research that for every lonely person, it costs the business $13,300 a year because of absenteeism, health issues and lost performance and disengagement.
Maria Ross 14:03
Yeah,
Dr. Tracy Brower 14:04
precisely. Yeah, so this woman spoke up and she said, I disagree. This is not the way we should be thinking about this. This is about people. This shouldn’t be about the bottom line, but it’s really both, right? Right, and we need to speak in the language that our businesses can understand why we would invest here. There was another when you were talking about, like, why would we be together. There was another organization that did a great job. They were a tech company, huge tech company, we all know, and they were just acquired not too long ago by another huge tech company. And as they were going through the acquisition, they went through this deep dive in terms of all their process designs as part of the process, and they were really careful about when they wanted people in person and when they were happy to do either remote or hybrid, and so they picked those critical periods in projects, so when they did a kickoff. It was critical to be in person and develop trust together when they were at key stage gates, when they had conflict or like really big differences of opinion when they were with the customer and getting information and feedback from the customer for the next iteration, they were really careful about what were those critical moments for connection. So I love that, and there’s so much, yeah, there’s so much research too on how place contributes to outcomes as well. There was a really.. Can I keep going? Yes, I know, I know, I’m keeping going,
Maria Ross 15:31
soaking it up. Go ahead, I know I’m
Dr. Tracy Brower 15:32
just on a roll, I have to stop and pause every now and then, right? But there was a really cool look at in-person work, and they asked a team to be in person, and to really focus on more coaching, really coaching each other, and the outcome of more coaching was more knowledge sharing. Well, that’s not rocket science, is it? Like, what is coaching, but more knowledge sharing? So, coaching led to more knowledge sharing, and more knowledge sharing led to a 15% increase in sales, isn’t that interesting? And the frosting on that cake, the intervention happened. The frosting on the cake is that the researchers came back 20 weeks later, and the results were still sticking. So that culture of coaching, of input, of connection really stuck and really drove results, and people felt happier and more fulfilled because they felt more connected. They felt like they were making a difference, right? Colleagues,
Maria Ross 16:30
right. Well, and this is where you know this, what we’re talking about is all about empathy. It’s trying to understand what your people need in order to thrive and get out of your own.. well, this is the way I work, or I, you know, I had to suffer through decades of working in a certain way, so does everybody else, right? And going, okay, well, things have changed, the workplace culture and expectations have changed, and I always say this: good on the younger generations for forcing that issue, because we’re spending the bulk of our time at work, it should be a place where we’re seen, heard, and valued right, and we’re happy to be there, but I want to bring up a couple things about what you said. One is, and this is another episode I’m going to link to with Shasta Nelson, who’s a dear friend of mine. She’s a friendship expert, and she wrote a book called The Business of Friendship, which cites all the data and the research around the fact that when you have friends at work, to your point, not necessarily BFFs, but sometimes if you have a best friend at work, what it does to productivity, to engagement, to less absenteeism, to better customer service, you know, by the people that are there, right, more loyalty, all of these things. So I referenced that, and I’m going to put a link to her in the show notes as well, because her book is phenomenal, The Business of Friendship. It came out a few years ago, and to your point that you were making about this woman in the workshop, I love that, because in my TEDx talk, I talked about how to trick leaders into being more empathetic, and it’s by showing them the business case
Dr. Tracy Brower 17:57
for being an empathetic
Maria Ross 17:58
leader, and I got some flack for that of saying, well, this is something that is about human connection, healing. You shouldn’t be, you know, dumbing it down into data and statistics, and I’m like, but whatever gets people there, right? We have to be empathetic to what people need in order to be convinced of something. And I love what you said, because this is all about my approach, it’s both, and it is. Yes, it’s good for society, but it’s also good for business, like it can be both of those things at the same time,
Dr. Tracy Brower 18:28
exactly. And we know that 75% of people make their friends at work. Oh, it’s the number two place. The number one place people make friends is high school. Number two is work. Number three is college, and we are more likely to make our more diverse friends at work, because we prefer homophily. Homophily is, you know, I kind of am automatically and instinctually attracted to people who might look like me and sound like me and think like me. That’s homophily, that’s kind of.. I’ve never heard that term instinct.
Dr. Tracy Brower 19:00
However, there’s also research that if about 50% of our network is different from us, we get the best boost in happiness and well-being, and work ends up being not only a place we make friends who are like us, but also we have more contact with people who are different from us. We’re thrown into the project room together, we’re thrown into the team, we have to solve a problem for the customer, right. So work ends up being a really important place that those friendships develop, and I think the other thing is that’s really interesting in the research on connection and community is sometimes we think about what we’re getting, like, oh, how do I get more connection, how do I get more friends. How do I get more support? And we know neurologically and sociologically and psychologically when we demonstrate empathy, when we give, we actually get so much of a payback. So, your point about empathy, right? And the more we are together, the more we can build social. Skills, the better we are at empathy, because we’re reading other people, we’re checking in, we’re vigilant, we’re, we’re doing the emotional labor of being together in meaningful ways. So,
Maria Ross 20:11
yeah, well, and proximity creates empathy, because if you are, you are every day being exposed to someone who is different from you, you, you gain an appreciation in whatever that difference is, right? It could be racial, it could be ethnic, it could be gender, it could be neurodiversity, it could be whatever it is, right. And to your point, I just laugh because most of my dearest and best friends are from my first job out of college, and then I met my husband at work, so you know we create those relationships and I remember in my 20s my whole life was work that was my social circle that was everything it was we we worked we were in a management consulting firm and we were on different projects but we came together socially and that’s one of the things that a lot of research has shown of where where Gen Z and younger millennials have a little bit of a blip because of the pandemic, they didn’t get to create those relationships at work that carry us, people like us, through the rest of our lives. They didn’t have that proximity, they didn’t develop those relationships, and it was very lonely for them,
Dr. Tracy Brower 21:18
because
Maria Ross 21:18
I think about, I didn’t make any other friends outside of work when I was in my 20s, really, right? So, yeah, where were they making friends that, and you know, the pandemic was a different thing, they couldn’t go out, but you know, right? And the other thing on that, that’s really interesting, I kind of keep going back to a word you gave me, which is proximity. We’re also seeing a skills gap with certain younger workers because they are not learning what I call learning by osmosis, being around other people. To your point about mentoring, and I see this a lot. I hear from my friends that are in the tech industry, for example, who are leaders in tech, and say sales people are not the caliber they used to be because they’re not learning from the senior sales people in the same environment, where they’re hearing each other on the phone, they’re they’re going to meetings together, they’re doing all these things, and I thought that was so interesting that it’s creating the lack of community and connection in person is creating a skills gap that once again impacts productivity and impacts organizational performance.
Dr. Tracy Brower 22:25
Yes, exactly. And there’s data around this as well, that people are reporting a decline in social skills. The younger people are, the more likely they are to say they don’t feel comfortable making conversation, they don’t know how to make eye contact, they’re not sure how to shake hands, they get really intimidated if they walk into a room of people, they just don’t have,
Maria Ross 22:44
they don’t have the reps. Yes, the
Dr. Tracy Brower 22:46
reps, and I think about it as social jet lag, right? Like, we just, because many of us struggle to come back, and our instinct as humans, our instinct when we’re under threat or pressure, which we are a lot in our VUCA world volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Our instinct is to come together, and if we don’t have places, avenues to come together as much, that becomes problematic for us. And profession is actually one of the seven pillars of friendship. When we share more of the pillars of friendship, they tend to be longer lasting friendships and deeper, and they’re things like dialect, like kind of we all came, we all came from the same place together, or taste in music, or sense of humor, or our sort of morality, or religion, or our hobbies, and profession ends up being part of that as well, because profession is a proxy for personality. This is not rocket science, right? But we tend to choose our profession based on the skills that are required of that profession, and so we end up, when we’re in our profession, working with people who are more similar to us. So then we’re back to homophily, right? Like we make friends because we have similarities with our professional connections, and so profession ends up being a really important pillar of friendship, and it ends up being an important part of what keeps us together as friends. The thing that I want to build on, too, that you were talking about is the importance of mentorship. There’s another example of an organization that they were hiring young talent, and they found that they’re young, they were losing them, they just weren’t, they weren’t sticking, weren’t sticking, that’s right, and they figured out that it was because they just weren’t feeling connected to enough people in enough places in the organization, right, it was the, they weren’t creating social capital, so they created a really, really great system for mentorship, and they were really planful and intentional about where people sat, so they could, so they could really be in proximity to their mentor and get coaching on an ongoing basis, but it made a huge difference then in retention, right. Because we still do stay at a job primarily because of the people that research is old and it’s new because it’s been replicated so many times
Maria Ross 25:09
exactly every time someone says well what about this research is new especially in the empathy world I’m like well some of it isn’t new but people haven’t learned their lesson yet we need to keep we need to keep hammering it home, right, but to your point about the need to be part of a group. I mean, think about any, any group you’re a part of, whether it’s a church or a volunteer organization. When you don’t feel like you’re part of it, you don’t want to attend the meetings, right? You don’t want to go, you feel like no one cares if you’re there or not, right, and so it’s almost like, well, they won’t miss me, and so I don’t want to be there, but if I feel like I’m contributing to an environment and I feel like it’s nourishing me back, that’s a place I’m going to go to. I’ve found this, I mean, this is personal experience in my own life of trying to join different groups, like certain groups. I feel really comfortable. I’m able to contribute right away. I feel welcomed. Those are the groups I go back to their monthly meetings, or I go back to their.. I engage on the online community. Other groups, where it’s like it doesn’t matter if you’re here or not, and if we translate that to the workplace, that’s what that does. And that’s the place where we need to be. We need to be there like eight plus hours a day. Yes. Why do we want to go back there if we don’t? And again, it’s not about showing up. What are you going to do for me? But do I feel like I’m being heard? Do I feel like they would miss me if I wasn’t there? Right, just the basic human yes that we have.
Dr. Tracy Brower 26:37
Yes, completely. There’s really beautiful research on belonging, like we don’t get a sense of belonging just from being with other people, right? We get a sense of belonging from a shared sense of social identity, and we also need a sense of purpose. There’s a really interesting study that correlated purpose and loneliness. When we have a higher sense of purpose, we tend to be less lonely, because a lot of times purpose is a collective concept, like we’ve shown up together to do the thing, we feel like we’re like you said it, we feel like we’re speaking the same language, I feel like people value me, they know if I’m here or not, they’re looking for my contribution because they value my contribution, yeah, and so when we have that shared sense of purpose and identity, that’s a really important part of feeling embedded in a group, feeling a sense of belonging in a group, for sure. And that you mentioned chemistry, right? You were making me think about, and there’s research on that, they call it the click factor, right? We’ve all experienced it, it’s that person that you could talk to for hours and you just click, or the group where you feel like you’re just speaking the same language, or the job that you get, and you feel like you’ve worked there forever, because you just kind of click and speak the same language, that is true belonging, and it has to do with that sense of embeddedness, and that sense that others are appreciating us for the role we serve in the group. So, yes, really interesting stuff.
Maria Ross 28:01
Oh my gosh, absolutely. And so I do want to take one concept that you’ve been talking about, which is this homophily, and just counter it with how do we make sure we don’t only surround ourselves with people who think or sound or look like us, because this show is a lot, and I know your work also is a lot about diversity and being able to make space for diverse perspectives and points of view, because we make better business decisions when we do that, so that’s another thing where I see attention, where’s the balance? There is it something where we just have to be aware, are we only gravitating towards certain groups, and I need to expand my network, like, how does that fit into the community of the workplace?
Dr. Tracy Brower 28:43
Yes, absolutely, it is a both, and like we’ve talked about, and there’s the research that says you won’t be purely happy if everybody’s like you, your best happiness and well-being come when your network is about 5050 50% who are more similar to you, 50% who are different from you, and so I think we do need to be really intentional about looking for diverse points of view, looking for people that are different from us, instead of in meetings saying, “Oh, does everybody agree? We say, “Who thinks about this differently? How would you, you know, how would you push back on this? We’re inviting that. This was a really interesting example. We worked with a really large university system, and I won’t even say the state that they’re in, because they’re pretty well known, really large university system, and they wanted more cross fertilization among departments, and so they took away assigned offices that were department specific, so like all the people in the education department were no longer sitting together, and all the people in the biology department were no longer sitting together. They mixed them all up, and it was mayhem. It was just mayhem, right? Because you just took my people away. Yeah, these are people that are really important to me, right? What they ended up doing is they ended up finding space for both. Both, so they still, they went back to actually assigned offices that were more department specific, so people could think together with others who had common disciplines and areas of competence, and they created community spaces where there could be more of that cross fertilization of ideas, so they really were able to focus on how we need both. There was a great study looked at MIT academicians and professors, and it looked at the number of published works they had, and it looked at how many citations for each published work, which is a measure of credibility for the work and the gravitas of the work, and they found that when professors and academicians had more contact with more different people within the university, they had more publications and more citations. They had better results when they had more diverse interactions, and they used geolocation, and so it was very valid and reliable, but exactly your point, we need to be very intentional about it, because our algorithms work way too well, right? Like we’re presented with data and information that already matches our current point of view, right? So we’ve got to look for groups that are maybe different than us, we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones to do things that may not be as familiar, so we can meet people who are in different places in their lives and have different points of view.
Maria Ross 31:30
You know, what’s really interesting about that is I’ve been creating spaces over the last year, like a two day experience for executive leaders, and it’s in advance of trying to do a mastermind program and create a space for leaders to come together and talk about some of these issues of the challenges and the joys of human-centered work and help each other, right. And the four cohorts I’ve run so far have not been industry specific, and I thought that was going to be an issue for people, right, of like, well, I’m a tech CMO. What am I going to learn from a nonprofit executive director? That was the one thing they all appreciated about the five hours that they spent with me over two days, right? Was it was so good to hear from other people in other industries to understand that they were facing the same challenges, but they had some unique ways of looking at the problem.
Dr. Tracy Brower 32:22
Yes, and
Maria Ross 32:23
I think that speaks to, like, sometimes we need to get out of our rut, and you know, we need to see, well, what are you doing over there? What are you doing over there? You might have a completely different experience and perspective that is additive for me, and I might have the same for you. So I love that you’re.. I’m glad we got a chance to talk about that, because I don’t want anyone to leave with the perception of we need to just find groups that are like us, because there is so much value in creating those communities intentionally that are made up of diverse people. My husband and I often joke that, you know, for a long time, a lot of our friends were only folks in Silicon Valley, and then you know we’ve made other friends along the way, but like for example, we have one friend who’s a podiatrist, and we’re like, we love having him at our parties, like we don’t talk about tech all the time, right? We’re talking about
Dr. Tracy Brower 33:10
feet,
Maria Ross 33:10
talking about feet, like, and it’s a different world, it’s like really understanding, wow, your work world is very different from our work world, right? Yes,
Dr. Tracy Brower 33:19
exactly, that’s what. Yes, I love that. And I think sometimes we, we think community needs to be within whatever our pond is, it’s within our organization, right? But we need those communities that are also apart from our main area. Yes, this also relates to weak ties, right? We think about our social networks, we can think about our social networks in concentric circles. We have our two or three closest people, and then our next five, and our next 10, and the farthest concentric circle are those weak ties. And by definition, people with weak ties have access to information that we don’t have, and our closest connections don’t have, so statistically, our newest, our new opportunities, our new jobs, our best new opportunities, even in volunteer work or in the community come from those weak ties, because they’ve got access to information that’s different than our own, so the opportunity, the promotion, they’ll advocate for us, so I think about the group that you’re talking about as an example, and those are probably people who will stay in touch to some extent. They may not be BFFs, no, they may end up being weak ties to each other. And the other thing that’s powerful about that is common experience. When we have shared experiences together, it builds our relationship one on one. It builds our relationship as a group. The other thing we have to say is that this is not about making everybody an extrovert. Community and connection work best when we also have our own space, when we have the ability to disconnect in. Intentionally, when we have the ability to get away, so that we can be fully immersed when we’re ready to be immersed, and so community and connection and friendship are critical, no matter what kind of preference we have on that continuum of introversion and extroversion.
Maria Ross 35:17
I love that. I love that. Yeah, it’s funny, because what the biggest compliments I got from the four cohorts I ran so far is that folks said I feel like I found my people, and I was like, that’s what I’m trying to create, I’m trying to create that space. More to come on that, listeners. But Tracy, this has been such an amazing conversation. Can you leave us with one little gem or nugget on if we don’t feel like we have a community, especially at work. How do we go about what’s a good first step we can make to build
Dr. Tracy Brower 35:47
it? I think the best first step is to reach out. Statistically, if we feel lonely, we feel very isolated, we kind of have blinders on, we might feel really shy about reaching out because we don’t want to say, hey, let’s have coffee and have somebody say thanks, coffee, yeah, thanks, but I think the best thing we can do is get over that hurdle and just ask somebody to have coffee, or invite a conversation before the meeting that gets started, or you know, reach out to the person, I think that taking a personal sense of agency of empowerment and looking for that connection, inviting that connection will make all the difference. It can be hard sometimes, but I think that’s really what, what we can do from a work and a personal standpoint.
Maria Ross 36:36
Love it. Mic drop. Thank you so much for your time. We could probably, we could be one of those people that talk for way longer, I’m sure, on this topic, but we have to go. So, we are going to have all of your links in the show notes, including the link to your new book, Critical Connections. And I hope folks will check it out and soak up your brilliance. For anyone that is not able to access the show notes right now, and they’re on the go, can you share one place that people can learn more about you and your work?
Dr. Tracy Brower 37:04
Yeah, absolutely. Tracy brower.com no E and Tracy, Tracy brower.com or you can find me on LinkedIn, Tracy Brower PhD. And Critical Connections is available wherever books are sold, so you, you know, find your best outlet, Amazon or anything, and it is available.
Maria Ross 37:20
Love it. Thank you so much, Tracy.
Dr. Tracy Brower 37:22
Thank you so appreciate it.
Maria Ross 37:24
And thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of The Empathy Edge Podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit The Empathy edge.com There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes, and free resources. Book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
