What is Connectional Intelligence?
Erica Dhawan, author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence was a keynote speaker at the American Marketing Association’s 2021 Leadership Summit. We’re excited to share with you the four principles of connectional intelligence that Dhawan shared during her speech and how you can apply them to your work and life.
What is connectional intelligence?
Let’s start with what is connectional intelligence? Connectional intelligence is the capability to unlock new and unrealized value by maximizing the power of networks and relationships. In the past year and throughout the pandemic, we’ve had fewer opportunities to connect in-person and relied on technologies like Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet, and more to make face-to-face connections. Despite these challenges, connection, networking, and relationships are more important than ever. The principles we share here apply to maximizing both in-person and virtual connections.
Principle 1: Value Visibly
The key to valuing visibly is to respect people’s time, inboxes, and schedules. Acknowledge individual differences, is someone an introvert or an extrovert? Practice radical recognition by giving people well-deserved shout-outs and showing your appreciation. Provide agendas before meetings and allow enough time in advance to review so they can come prepared. Have a strong meeting moderator who helps ensure that meetings start and end on time.
Principle 2: Communicate Carefully
The key to communicating carefully is thinking before you type. Make sure that your communication is delivered with clarity. As you’re preparing your communication, make sure that you’re using the correct channel. Digital communication can be easily misunderstood, so a phone call or video call may be preferred to a thread of emails back and forth. The subject line of your email is important to get people to read your communication. As you’re preparing your written communication, remember to get to the point, use formatting like headings, bullet points, or numbers to organize information.
Principle 3: Collaborate Confidently
The key to collaborating confidently is to say what you’ll do and do what you say. Follow-through helps create trust and confidence across your team. Setting priorities, staying on track, and attention to detail are also essential. Your team should identify the tools that you’ll use for collaboration, the norms for their use, and expectations you have around response time. Typically instant messaging and Slack are used for time-sensitive or urgent work that requires a relatively short response time and simple conversations. A tool like Slack or email can also be used to inform multiple people at the same time. Take a look at your current collaboration tools and create a table that identifies the usage, response time, and norms for each tool. This may include: instant messaging, email, phone or Zoom calls, individual or group text messaging.
Principle 4: Trust Totally
In order to have a functional team, you need to trust the people you are working with and give them the benefit of the doubt. In our virtual world, it might be helpful to create some virtual water cooler moments where people can socialize outside of only interacting on work-related projects. Your team should also be able to make mistakes and show vulnerabilities without feeling like they’ll be unfairly reprimanded. When your team trusts each other they’ll be able to achieve much more.
For each of the principles, here are some guiding questions to work through to see where your team stands.
Value Visibly
Do we feel like our time is respected?
Do we feel like our best work is acknowledged and celebrated?
Do we feel comfortable voicing concerns?
Communicate Carefully
Do we feel there is a common understanding of priorities and next steps?
Do we have a clear understanding of which channels to use and when?
Do we have clear language and word choice to foster understanding?
Collaborate Confidently
Do all the appropriate stakeholders feel identified and aligned?
Do we feel that the correct people are informed – and are they cascading messages appropriately?
Do we feel there is consistency in communications across teams?
Trust Totally
Do we give each other the benefit of the doubt when facing uncertainty?
Do we show vulnerability?
Do we create moments for informal social connections?
We hope that you find these principles helpful to apply to your work and in life. At AMA PDX, we are always striving to provide educational content that can benefit our members and the broader marketing community. We invite you to:
– Learn more about Membership and become a member.
– Join us for a future speaker or event, if you’re a member, all events are free to attend.