How Do We Connect?

Written by: Craig Twombly

Published: November 2011

Over the last several months, I have spent a great deal of time traveling and meeting new people. Some times for business, some times for family and even a little time with friends. During many long quiet rides home in my car, it got me thinking. I found myself looking back toward a previous job as a manager of a restaurant and the relationships I had made along the way.

The most flattering compliment I ever received was from a VP of operations several years ago. We had met to tour a restaurant and the conversation was the basic corporate conversation around financials, turnover, market-share margins and so on. Although these tours were important, I found them to be rather impersonal. The corporate restaurant tour usually involved walking through the building, stopping to say hello to employees, talking with managers, and so on. On one of the tours of my own restaurant, the Vice President and I were at the outside of the building and, as we approached the front of the building, he stopped and looked up the roof. Instantly my thoughts were, "Oh boy, what is wrong?" He somehow felt it was his job to point out every flaw he saw along the way. As he looked up at the roof, he asked me a question that several years later make me smile, "How is it that no matter where you go, you could get an entire staff to run to the roof and jump off?" Although I found myself a little uncomfortable, it was a rather large compliment.

Since I began working at Priority Learning I have continued to leverage and improve on my skills to connect with people. Some people may consider it the skill of convincing or brainwashing individuals. I look at it as the skill of connecting with people and a very important one. Those that are great at it are admired, well liked and, in most cases, become great leaders. As we have all heard, the ability to connect is not an easy task. Every person relates to something totally different, which makes connecting with others such a hard skill and much harder to attain. To make better connections, we use a tool called Myers-Briggs, which speaks to certain parts of our personality: Extroversion or Introversion, Thinking or Feeling, etc. This tool can help us interact and connect with people that we work, live and socialize with, so we recommend using it as a way to help connect at a higher level with people. (If you'd like more info about this, please feel free to contact us.)

So, as I have spent a great deal of time traveling over the last several months it has me curious about how others connect with people. I would love to hear your thoughts and also what you view about connecting with others.

Craig Twombly

Craig is the primary facilitator at Priority Learning, he is responsible for conducting an array of leadership series offered and consulting assignments from communications to team development in organizations ranging from the service industries to finance, manufacturing and more. Having extensive experience at balancing the business needs with the wants and desires of people are Craig's strongest assets.