I will confess to a bias. I believe that relationships are the economy of life, and that trust is the currency of that economy. I hear people say that they are leaving this organization or that one because they don’t like the politics. Politics are the manifestations of the economy at work, “the total complex of relations between people living in society:” sometimes messy, often unfortunate, always inevitable. It’s just a matter of people working things out together; trying to balance the authentic desire to act with others’ interests in mind while we are simultaneously trying to control our hardwired nature to survive and to promote our own agendas. Leadership in specific and life in general requires that we establish the balance, that we learn how to be trustworthy, and that we master relationships. As with any skill (Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours”) to become expert, we have to practice.
The picture is a family’s clever holiday card, all the more poignant because it is hauntingly familiar. Most of us can relate to a time when we were speaking with someone who answered a text message or a blackberry email mid-conversation. We have all seen the family in the airport or in a restaurant simultaneously on digital devices, and presumably not communicating with each other.
One thing is certain from a “history of humankind” standpoint: this behavior is different. While we have had personal digital devices since the nineties (remember Palm Pilots?), the explosion and cultural shift that has occurred with the proliferation of social media and specifically “short message service” (texting) applications to the tune of literally trillions of messages globally every year has to be having an effect on us. This is of course to say nothing of the introduction of “smart” phones that bring the Internet to one’s pocket, as another source of near perpetual distraction (said the man still carrying both a government Blackberry and a five year old Samsung “dumb” phone). What is the impact of all this on late Millennials (1980-2000) and members of “Generation Z” (born after 2000), the oldest of whom are in middle school? If you agree that time, energy and focus are finite, what happens when you spend fewer hours in direct, eye to eye, person to person contact and more time with personal digital devices?
Scholars have proposed that a novel, second form of emotional intelligence, “cyber-emotional intelligence” has emerged with the introduction of Web 2.0 (social and interactive media) a decade or so ago. This emotional capability to perceive, understand, manage and express emotion on-line is honed in a variety of ways, for example by the use of “emoticons” and other web-based tools. The question is whether these skills make individuals more or less competent in the basic face to face interpersonal relationship management still required in leadership and life. Frankly, I’m a little skeptical.
As I have said, I admit to having a bias toward the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership that is based on my experience, but may also be colored by my ”intuition-feeling” heavy Myers-Briggs temperament. I acknowledge that leadership today requires mastery of writing and electronic communication. (Parenting seems to require it as well, especially as children become adults and relocate away from home.) But I cannot foresee a time in the near future when we will not also need expertise in meeting and engaging in dialogue with humans face to face.
So we can begin in health care at least, by defining personal digital activity as “off-stage” behavior; to be carried out on breaks and away from direct patient contact areas. The challenge is to convince our younger colleagues not only that they cannot engage in these activities in patient or customer care areas, but that they shouldn’t. Every human interaction has the potential to be an opportunity toward relational mastery; the social equivalent of Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.
What we used to take for granted in the pre-digital era, a plethora of daily human interactions that potentially made us progressively better at self and relational management, may now require a new level of “attentionality” and intentionality. We have to be present and cognizant in ways that we once took for granted. If we are to encourage those whom we lead to be successful as leaders themselves, they will need to pay attention to the potential digital challenges as they navigate the economy of human relationships.
In the end at least for now, I think that’s where the money is.
Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front https://henryv43.wordpress.com/
Henry V 4.3 
Well said Sir.
Thanks! I wonder if anyone else has an observation? How much should we be concerned? What should we be asking our people to do – and not to do – regarding personal digital devices in customer-service areas (“on-stage” in current hospital vernacular!?)
Thank you for sharing, Sir. You may enjoy the following article as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. While it deals more with how the digital cultural shapes the way we use our mind, I think you’ll find some interesting philosophical cross-sections.
It is hard to quantify how much, if at all, digital distractions take away from actual human interactions and the impact that it has on social development. A lot of times this is only an extension of people’s natural proclivity to being social. After all, those individuals who are most social spend more time texting to their vast network of friends. At the same time this is only an extension of the phenomenon induced by technology. A few decades ago, it was the son or daughter (the latter more stereotypically) who would spend all their time chatting on chord phones and never want to spend any time with their families. People reach out to those that they can relate to, the chord phones or the new phones do not alienate children from their families or people from people per se. If a child cannot relate to his/her family and he/she has a strong social drive (extrovert) then it is natural for him/her to satisfy that drive by whatever means. Just because everyone is smiling and hugging in a family holiday card photo does not mean they like each other. Different types of digital outlets relate to different types of personality as well and can hint at the individual’s ability to hold real social relationships. There is a big difference between texting and facebook’ing versus other forms of cyber communication media (e.g. chat rooms and massively multiplayer online video games) and it will be too simple to say that anyone who spends too much time doing any of those activities would not develop leadership or social skills (and the leadership part is even more questionable). To me, it is not so important whether people submerse themselves in a digital life but if they do so to escape their actual lives because they are unwilling to learn the social skills needed to cope with everyday life situations. As technology develops farther and researchers learn to decipher the electrochemical signals of the human mind we are more likely to spend more time away from real life but that is not to say that the digital counterpart is not real, less meaningful or a rich ground to explore and practice social and leadership skills.
There is no doubt that as the world changes and socialization becomes more digital, that our understanding of relationships will change too. I am also very cautious about my own developmental history; that I am a digital immigrant and not a digital native like the young leaders to whom we are passing the reins. Still I am concerned that the skills that come from repeated face to face interaction may not develop as quickly when we rely on digital “text-based” devices like SMS and email. Chris Anderson of TED said about public speaking (one of our four “cardinal skills” of the leader: reading, writing, rounding and rhetoric:) “There is a lot more being transferred than just words. It is in the nonverbal portion that there’s serious magic. Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the passion.. There are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand and whether you are inspired.” There is much to gain and potentially much to lose if we migrate to far away from face to face communication!