Since we have a Business Anthropologist on staff, in our consulting work we lean heavily into Workplace Culture and Change Models. Much of the workplace culture repair work we do is a result of people skipping the time it takes to build rapport. And what we really mean by rapport is mutual trust.
Anyone in business wants to gain some level of influence. The better skilled you are at building rapport and building it in less time, the more influence you can wield and the more of your goals you will achieve.
When studying organizations, we find that many people who want to improve engagement, evolve their operational processes, build belonging and community, or implement a process change strategy; they are held back by their lack of rapport-building
skills.
Where do these rapport-dependent moments show up in your life?
They show up at sales meetings, at projects where a team approach is required, and where you are working with others to reach a shared result or a strategy that you want to implement.
When Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy talks about meeting new people in her book, she says we are all trying to answer two questions: 1) can I trust this person, and 2) can I respect this person? Likely, when you work with someone new, you subconsciously ask yourself can I trust this person and can I respect them? And, in asking this of ourselves, we tend to forget that others are simultaneously asking themselves the same questions about us.
You can imagine a bunch of people in a boat all rowing in the same direction and all of a sudden one person in that boat sticks their oar in the water and just leaves it there.
One person could cause drag on the metaphorical boat of your team, of your project, of reaching your goals, or of creating your dreams.
By improving your rapport-building skills and using them to improve your influence, you might just get that one person’s oar out of the water and get them rowing in the same direction as the group.
In the next issue, we’ll go into detail about how to improve your rapport-building skills.
In the meantime, decide for yourself if there are people out there who you know that if you just had better rapport with them, then you might reach your goals faster and smoother.
