Scaling in Public Tip: Virtual Relationships
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, in our Scaling in Public series, we had Sanjay Parekh and Adam Walker guiding us through – a lot of it was centered around leveraging video. A great deal of the conversation talked about virtual relationships, which is a little different than the way our company was founded, with so much of the in-person work in studios. What do you think about what Adam specifically had to say about virtual relationships?
Lee Kantor: Yeah, this is something that was really – it caused me to kind of rethink how we do things and where there’s opportunities within our model on how to implement adding video or adding these kinds of non-in-person ways to build relationships.
Lee Kantor: And what he said was that virtual relationships don’t build themselves. And when teams work remotely or relationships happen through video, you’re obviously going to lose some of these natural water cooler moments, that serendipity that happens, that kind of magic that happens when you’re inside the bubble of a studio and everybody’s got headphones, and everybody’s looking at each other face to face. You lose that. I mean, that’s just a fact. It’s not as prevalent when you’re dealing with somebody virtually.
Stone Payton: So, in order to kind of create those moments, you can’t happen by accident. So, if you’re working virtually, you have to create those moments intentionally. And some of the ways to do that are you leave a few minutes at the start of the call to talk about things just casually. You give space for that kind of human-to-human interaction.
Lee Kantor: You have to kind of schedule these kinds of informal check-ins if you’re dealing with a team remotely. And if you’re dealing with doing what we do, which is kind of doing interviews, you have to kind of create space at the front end, and you have to create space at the back end because you need to get that human-to-human interaction happening. It has to be injected into this process. It’s not going to happen if you’re just kind of get the person on, do the interview, get the person off, move on to the next interview.
Lee Kantor: You need to create space for these informal conversations to occur, because strong business relationships don’t just come from a super structured interaction. They come from the human elements and the human moments in between that. So, create space for human-to-human interaction before and after your interviews if you’re trying to build relationships during this kind of interview process.
