I was recently in Bonn to run a workshop for a client with whom I first worked nearly 25 years ago. Since then he has moved from company to company, taking me with him. He’s a terribly nice chap and we have a lot of fun together, which all in all means he is pretty much the perfect client.

And he appears to have my personal best interests at heart, because he keeps asking why I don’t  push to do more work, as I still have great energy for it and have a ton of experience to offer. Truth be told I have stopped chasing it ever since my late wife Charlotte died, telling myself there are other things I can be doing and that I don’t need to work any more.

But I’m still only 66 and have plenty of mileage left in me, and my enthusiasm for what I do and my passion for helping people remains undiminished.  So what the hell am I playing at?

Our new organ. Built 1918 and previously installed in Christ Church cathedral, Oxford.

It’s a good question, and one my new wife of 2 years Philly is also curious about. The answer is I have got distracted: Philly and I bought an ancient farm in Dartmoor together, in need of some TLC e.g untended granite walls and overgrown hedges, damp walls and rotting doors, that type of thing. We got married, which is a wonderful distraction at our age. I am discovering the joy of travel to weird places. Fundraising to replace the organ in our church (so I can have more fun playing it), and then going and finding one and getting it installed. The list goes on. I am capable of infinite self distraction.

But then when I think about it, I still have much to offer. The work I do with teams and leaders boils down to helping them to make some sense of what they do, to find more meaning in it, and ultimately to help them connect with other humans and build fruitful relationships. Since I took my foot off the pedal in providing this support in 2018, when Charlotte died, the world has gone through a radical change, especially in the workplace.

Business life has changed radically over the last 5 years from the modes of communications, to working from home, to how we communicate internally and externally,  to Gen AI and its impacts.  The need to understand, build trust and rapport still remains as important as ever but is infinitely more challenging given the new workplace environment.

COVID transformed the way people think about the work, and led to new behaviours which have made it so much harder to build relationships. This was rammed home to me a couple of weeks ago when I ran another workshop for this client in Philadelphia. I stepped outside the meeting room on the first morning and took a walk through the office.  At 10am on a Monday morning the place was a ghost ship. 4 humans in an office space designed for well over one hundred.

I was told it is like this all the time.  If you work in an office like this, how are you supposed to build relationships with your peers? How does trust get established if you never see people physically? How do you get to kick ideas around, sanity check stuff, except on a Teams call where people don’t even turn on their cameras (which I find utterly bonkers), and half the people on the call don’t say anything.

Let’s leave it there for now. Nothing new in what I have to say on this, I’m quite sure. We are on a slippery slope towards workplace autism, frankly, and I genuinely worry about how society is damaging itself and the speed at which this is all evolving. My Bonn client has Meta as a client, and he was telling me today they are working on glasses you can wear which allow you to read email / scroll social media whilst walking or doing something else. OMG! Errr, why? Because they see a market for it and there will be people who think this is a needed an innovative development. The early adopters will soon be followed by others and before you know it we are wearing our Inboxes and not giving it a second thought.

I can help people to resist the tide on this. I find that when I am working, the stuff which really resonates is what I think of as absolute basics.  The top three are:

  1. How to ask a good question (people find this SO hard, for a variety of reasons)
  2. How to be assertive (conflict avoidance is still the preferred way of handling workplace conflict)
  3. How to be less expert and more human.

We worked on this with the team in Philadelphia and saw someone deploy it during the afternoon of day one with a client. Instead of jumping into a solution when the client described a problem, she asked some innocent 8 year old-type questions (why is that, how come, what happened etc.), and as a result uncovered a much deeper issue than it first appeared, leading to a much better long term solution. Boom!

I guess I’m writing this article to let you know I am still here, still ready and willing to help, and still doing much the same thing as I always have. The difference is that the context has changed, and this sort of stuff is needed now more than it ever was. I hope you agree.

If you think I can help, do get in touch.

And if you read this article all the way to the end, thanks for humouring me. It feels good to get this off my chest!