 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios here. Can't believe we just turned the calendar on September the first of 2020. What a year, it's cruising by and one of the big topics obviously is working from home. We're seeing more and more companies telling everybody to expect to work from home through the end of the year or into next year some are even saying indefinitely. And we've got an expert coming on the show that we're excited to have back. It's Dr. Karen Sobolejewski. She is the founder and CEO and author of Virtual Distance and the Virtual Distance Company. Karen, great to see you. Great to see you too, Jeff. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So I wanted to get you back on for a couple of reasons. One is we first met at the ACG-SV Association for Corporate Gross Silicon Valley 2018 Awards about two years ago, it was summer of 2018. And at that point you introduced me to the concept and our audience to the concept of Virtual Distance which if I can summarize is basically communicating through devices versus face to face like we're doing here and the bad neat things that come from that and challenges and this that and the other. Who knew that two years from then we would all be forced and not asked but forced to basically go to a work from home environment and increase the frequency and use of using electronic devices to communicate not only for work but also for social stuff, for school, for everything. So oh my goodness, you happened to be in the right place at the right time for not necessarily the greatest of reasons but wow, I mean how amazing this transformation that we've all been forced to since the middle of March. First off, get your thoughts on that and then we'll dive into what people should be thinking about what people should be doing about it and how they can, I don't wanna say make the most but it is kind of make the most of not necessarily the greatest situation. Yeah, well I could have never imagined when we were sitting out at that round table outside the room where we had dinner that we'd be here two years later, right? Talking about virtual distance as you said and in the context of everyone having to be isolated from each other and working from home. Obviously like everyone on the planet, I think I would never have wanted to see this happen but I feel fortunate in a way to have put this out there many years ago because today it's serving a lot of different organizations, corporations, schools even government organizations to have a very steady framework that's based on 15 years of data to understand how to make the best as you said of this situation and to reduce some of the negative consequences of virtual distance and actually use the framework as a way to get to know people better and really see them more as human beings in a way that helps them through not just their work life but also through the family challenges that they're having with every kid now sort of going back to school, many of them online. There's a lot of virtual distance that can crop up even in the house but I guess I'm glad that I discovered virtual distance and that it's useful in this time. Right, right. So let's jump into it and actually I want to skip to the end of the book before we get into the beginning of the book because you talked about leadership and when this thing first hit we had a number of leadership on from the community talking about leading through trying times and most great leaders know that their primary job's really communication, right? It's communication to their teams, communication to their constituents, that communication to their customers. COVID has really changed the communication challenges and increased them dramatically and most of the stuff we're hearing is that leaders need to communicate more frequently and more variety, both in terms of topics as well as communication forms. How does that kind of jive with your studies on virtual distance and leadership given the fact that there aren't a lot of other options in terms of face to face or a little bit more intimate things they have to use these electronic means. So what tips do you have for leaders as they suddenly were told everybody's working from home starting like tomorrow? Yeah, well it's funny that you asked me that because we learned early on when I started looking at this phenomenon in the early 2000s, we learned early on that it actually takes a lot more work and time to lead virtually than it does in more traditional environments. And the reason is, is because the leader really has to bring forward a lot of context that tends to go underground or become invisible without other people when we're working virtually. So the leader already was under a lot of pressure, if you will, to communicate much more than they had been in more traditional settings because a lot of the information and knowledge and intelligence, if you will, about the company was available in the context of the environment and other people. So leaders were already on track to having to communicate much more in order to make remote work and virtual work work. Well, which of course it can. Right. But what happened was we found that when suddenly a light switch is turned off, leaders needed to communicate even more and that is kind of standard crisis management leadership. We talked a little bit about that in the past. So we can look at the situation we're in as not just an acute crisis that came to bear in early January and then sort of everything walking down in March, but we can kind of look at this as a long-term leadership crisis management strategy on top of just over communicating to do better in virtual space. And in a crisis management situation, you definitely want to have even more communication. But it's also an opportunity actually to develop other leaders behind you on teams that can also communicate as well to share that responsibility, to share that leadership commitment to a lot of communication during times like this. That actually works really well. Right. Because one of the things you talk about that's super, super important, more important actually than physical distance or the virtual distance is what you call the affinity distance. And I think it ties back to another point in the book in terms of clarity of communication from the leadership. What are the goals? What is the vision? And reinforcing that at a rate and frequency much higher than they've ever done before to build that affinity so people can continue to feel like they're part of something beyond more just the tasks and the roles and the assignments that I have to do every day. Yeah, that's exactly right, Jeff. So again, we found early on and it was a surprise to us at first but then became kind of obvious that people tend to think that the real challenge with virtual work is physical distance, right? Sort of the space between us in terms of a geography or a geographic separation. And what we learned early on through the statistics as well as sort of common sense was that actually physical distance had the least impact on corporate outcomes than any of the other three factors. So the affinity distance piece is really all about how do I gain an affinity for someone when I really don't know that much about them and I don't know much about their context in the moment that we're talking and I also just know less about them in general when we're virtual. So affinity distance is much more important than the physical separation because it's what holds us together and allows us to build very, very deep relationships which we can count on and trust no matter what the situation is. And yeah, doing that in these times is very important. So it's funny, right? Because so much of the problems that we have with communications are in the subtle feedback mechanisms that aren't necessarily in the overt communication. And as you said, those can be lost in a lot of channels. What's kind of interesting that's going on with COVID is we're actually seeing a side of people that we never did see in the physical space, right? Now we're literally being invited into everyone's home. I mean, I'm in your home office, I can see your books on your bookshelf and people are bringing people into their home which they may not have done before, been comfortable. Not only that, but the spouses there, he or she is working from home, the kids are there, they're doing their school from home, the occasional dog or pet or other thing kind of jumping through the screen. So it's this weird kind of juxtaposition. On one hand, you've lost a whole lot of kind of subtle communication reinforcers. On the other hand, you're getting kind of a whole new kind of the human side aspect in terms of who these people are and what they're all about that you never necessarily had before. So I think the blending of the whole self is probably been elevated even though the communication challenges without having kind of all these subtle feedback loops that we really rely on are gone. So when you think about communication and communication methods based on communication messages and what you're trying to do, how do you tell people to think about that? What types of communications should be done and which ways to make them the most effective and avoid some of the real problems that come from the wrong type of communication on the wrong type of channel? Yeah, so first of all, you make some great points because it really is when we invite people into our home via these kinds of video links that people see a different side of us, a contextualized side to us that they normally wouldn't see. And that opens the door, as you said, to having other communications. I think before I get directly to your question, one thing that strikes me about what you say is that this is truly a shared experience, right? So all of us are being impacted by COVID-19, the economics of the situation, the childcare issues that are raised by the situation, the community issues that we all have in our towns or cities. And we're sharing that experience, which is a great jumping off point in terms of communications because we actually have a very similar context from which we're working. In terms of which communications to use when, this is a really important question. I had a person from a very, very large tech company that people use every day and go look for things on the internet, call me and tell me at one point early, sort of early on in the pandemic that some of his people were starting to beg him to turn off the video screens and just use audio because sometimes when we're overwhelmed with a crisis, the video can be helpful, but it can also sort of be overwhelming. So it's important to understand sort of when to discern, when to use audio, when to use visual, when to use email and when to use texts. And the basic tips here is that email has really never been good to explain ourselves to other people. It's been great to set up lunch dates or an appointment and things like that. So email should be used pretty sparingly. Audio is really great if we don't have video but we also just kind of need arrest from video and we also need to really focus on a person's voice very, very intensely. So if we're trying to solve a really critical problem that's a little bit conceptual, sometimes audio can be more helpful. Video is obviously great because it gives us all this context and it allows people to see into our home and hear our cats kind of screaming at each other, which is happening right now in my house. But it also lets us see each other's expressions and a little bit of the facial communication that we need in order to know if people are okay with what we're saying, if they're quizzical and looking like they kind of don't understand, et cetera. The overarching goal of communications in a situation like this that I talk a lot about in the book is to mix up modes of communication as much as you can think about that, right? Because we get context, as I've just explained, in different ways through different modes. And so if we mix it up, if I say, well, I've talked to Jeff a lot over video, maybe I'll just give him a call today or I've been using a lot of email to talk to one of my colleagues in Norway. Maybe I should really try to set up a video call. That is very helpful because it gives us dimensionality to someone's personality as well as their context. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think most people are always saying, turn on the video, turn on the video. We want to see everybody's face, but as this thing continues to go and go and go and it's going to go for the foreseeable future, and people are going to get fatigue, right? People are getting zoom fatigue. That's a really interesting and simple way to, I think, kind of lessen the stress a little bit by telling people, let's just turn the video off. We don't necessarily need to see each other. We know what we look like. And if you feel some reason to turn it on, you can turn it on. But having that as an option, I think that's really insightful. And the other thing I want to focus on is it's not all negative, right? I mean, there's a lot of studies about the open office plan, which didn't necessarily work so well. And we've had conversations with a lot of people that say, just because you throw everybody in a room together doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to communicate more and there aren't necessarily the water cooler chatter that you're kind of hoping for. And in fact, you have a bunch of stats in the book here about remote workers having actually a lot of success. They have less trouble with technology. They can cope best with multiple projects. There's so many less interruptions, assuming the rest of the family has a place to work. But you don't get kind of the work interruptions that you would in terms of actually getting projects done. So it's not all bad. And I think there's a lot of things that we can help people think about to really take advantage or make the most of the opportunity to take advantage is probably the wrong word. So very communications, frequency of communications is certainly a good one. What are other ways that people kind of build trust? Because you talk a lot about trust and feeling part of something bigger and not letting the individual tasks and the little day-to-day things that we do get in the way of still feeling like you belong to something that's important, that you care about with your teammates that you want to move forward. Yes, it's a great question because, and again, I think obviously, you know, amongst sort of the darkness, there's always sort of opportunities to see some light. And I think one of the ways that we can see light through working this way at this time is to expand our understanding of the people that we're working with, right? So, and we can do that in a framework. It doesn't have to be haphazard. So when we look at affinity, what we really want to do is to bring forward the way people feel about their value systems, what's important to them about work in sort of pre-COVID or BC right before COVID, but also what's important to them about their family life or about the situation that's happening that's interacting with and integrating with their work life. So asking those questions in ways that are not guised or, you know, but sort of directly asking them things about what they value, how they feel that they're interdependent on other people, why other people are important to them in their work as well as just in their day to day lives. Those are the kinds of opportunities for questions around things that are not work related are not, you know, party Friday, which are also kind of fun things, right? But that get more to the core of who a person is, that whole person that you were talking about. And that allows us to see so much more deeply, ironically, into that human being. And when you talk about purpose and really wanting to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, those kinds of insights that build affinity help us help other people. So, you know, we tend to focus on task orientation and goals and deliverables and all that, which is absolutely critical for business continuity and to get through the day and focus our attention. But actually, what makes people feel really good about their day as a person is often how they can help other people. And so if we draw this closer affinity, we can actually figure out ways to help other people and that just lifts everybody up and makes the work product actually even better. Right, right. I've always, you know, ascribed to the theory that right, if you spend your work helping other people do their work better, easier, get roadblocks out of the way, whatever, you know, being an enabler, you know, then you're getting this multiplier effect because I'm doing my work and I'm helping somebody else be more efficient and it's a very different way to kind of think about work in terms of helping everybody be more effective and more efficient. And as you said, you get this great multiplier effect. But I want to shift gears a little bit and this sentence just jumped out of your book. I'm actually going to read from it that despite the fact that many leadership challenges are new, we continue to over rely on management thinking and solutions that are fundamentally designed around outdated assumptions. I mean, to me, this is such a huge thing. We had Martin Mikosan at the beginning of this process and his great line, and he's managed remote companies for years and multiple companies. And he said, it's so easy to fake it in the office. Right, it's so easy to look busy. Whereas when you're working from home, the only thing you have to show is your output and that's what you're graded on your output. And yet, you know, when this thing first hit, we saw all types of new products coming out that are basically spyware for the employees, you know, how often are you sitting in front of your computer? How often are you on a Zoom call? How often are you, you know, doing these things? And it was, it's striking to me that it's such an outdated way to measure activity versus a way to measure outcome and output. And, you know, what are you trying to do? I mean, it just drives me crazy to hear those things. I just love to get your take that people still, still are mixed up about what they're supposed to be measuring and what the purpose of the whole task is, which is to get output done, not just to be busy and sit in Zoom calls all day. It's so true. So there's sort of two prongs to that question and two very important things to look at. So one is, how do we measure productivity, right? Among knowledge workers, which has been the topic of a lot of conversation. And the other thing is what have leadership models been built off of in the past, right? So if you just take the first thing first, productivity today, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, you will still see productivity defined as how many widgets can I produce in an hour? That's still today, how we measure productivity, even though all of our output or most of our output, right, is coming from our knowledge, our thinking, our problem solving. So the notion of productivity feels very heavy handed to a lot of people because it's still rooted, literally, economics-wise in this notion of X widgets per hour, which just doesn't fit. And that comes through at the second point, which is our leadership models, right? So I talk in the book, and I've been talking about this for many years because it just jumped out at me when I started to do this research, is that if you look at most leadership models today, any one of them, whatever one you like, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, situational leadership, whatever it might be, those leadership models were built mainly in the 1950s and some of them came later in the 80s. And we have a few new ones, excuse me, that have come after the internet, but not too many. And fundamentally, if you look at the communication mode of leaders in the 50s and the 80s, it was face-to-face or phone. I mean, it just, by definition, was in-person or via phone. But that assumption doesn't hold true anymore and hasn't held true for a good 15 years. And yet, in every business school today, we still use those leadership models as sort of our first run at how to lead. It's not that they're not useful and helpful and don't have extremely good words of advice for leaders. But the main thing leaders do is communicate. So if the fundamental channel over which leaders are communicating has completely changed, it seems natural that we should be looking for new leadership models that fit our times a little bit better, taking pieces of the best of those leadership models, but really turning them on their head and saying, what's really a better approach when fundamentally our communication mode itself, it has completely changed. And that's what we do with leaders. And I do just want to say a word. We're talking about working from home and knowledge workers. And unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people going through COVID right now that don't have that option, right? If you're in the travel industry, if you're in the hospitality industry, if you're in a lot of services industries, if you are a plumber, you can't go virtual as a plumber, unfortunately. So just to acknowledge that what we're talking about applies to a lot of people, but certainly not everyone and everyone doesn't have these options. I just wanted to mention that. But before we wrap, Karen, the thing that struck me as you're talking about kind of the 50s and the organizational structure was it was really command and control and just top-down hierarchies that dictated what people did. And then you, as you said, your job was to put so many widgets on the widget receiver per hour and that's what you were graded on. We're a knowledge workers, it's a very different thing. And in fact, you shouldn't tell people how to do things. You should tell people what the objectives are and then see what they come up with. And hopefully they'll come up with lots of different ways to achieve the objective, most of which the management has never thought of. They're not down in the weeds and you get all kinds of interesting and diversity of opinion and different approaches and kind of a dev ops mentality where you try lots of things and you'll find new ways to get it down. So I want to close out on this final kind of communication piece for leadership and this is the why. I think back in the 50s, I don't know that the why was that important or maybe it wasn't and I'm not giving it enough credit, but today the why is so important. That is such a big piece of, why do I come to work every day and why am I important to work with my colleagues and move this mission forward? And so I wonder if you can just share how important the why is today and then how important the why is in trying to build the culture and hold people together when they are now by rule distributed all over the place. Talk a little bit about the why. Yeah, I love that question, Jeff, because in the book, I talk a lot about Taylorism and Taylor was the founder of bureaucratic management and leadership and he actually despised the worker. There's actually a little piece in the book where he's testifying to Congress and saying that the man who handles pig iron, a type of steel, wasn't intelligent enough to understand what pig iron really was. He got a lot of flak for that. So as we've evolved and as we've grown as organizations into knowledge workers, and I think your point about not everyone is a quote, unquote, knowledge worker is really, really important. The bottom line is we're trying to measure our output and the value of our work by these older standards. And so people are struggling a little bit with that sort of disconnect. And looking for why, what purpose do they have? What is their bigger purpose? How are they connected to the organization in new ways? And there's actually an excellent analogy in the Navy, has its traditions in the Navy called Commander's Intent, which I talk about. So if you think of ships that used to sail, right, out to sea and they had lots of goals about either taking over a certain country or whatever it was they were doing, they couldn't be together, right? So we've been working remotely for a very long time. So the commander would gather all of his lieutenants and basically tell them what his, or there were no horrors at that time, but what his intentions were. And the lieutenants, the captains of the other ships would go out to each ship and they wouldn't follow a blueprint tactical plan. They would just have the commander's intent as their guide. And then they were free actually to use whatever strategies and tactics that they thought of and that worked in their context in order to fulfill the commander's intent, but they weren't given a blueprint. Their goal was really to use their own smarts, their own critical thinking in order to carry forward that intent. And I think that idea is very powerful today because I think if leaders can focus on helping their workers, the employees, their ecosystem partners, supply chain partners, whatever it may be, understand what the intent of the company is and show that they trust the employees or the partner to deliver on that intent with whatever means and creativity and imagination guided by the intent can be used and selected from on their day to day lives. People will feel so much more empowered and still get to the same outcome or actually better than if they're told, okay, do A, B, C and D. So this idea of leader intent, I think would work really, would serve companies really well during this time. And if I could just add one other quick thing, there's another idea that comes out of sort of the military that I used in doing some work with leadership crisis management after 9-11 around this notion of net centricity. Net centricity is sort of allowing people on the ground to sort of form their own networks and push information up to leadership so that they can make certain decisions and then push those decisions down with an intention back to the ground so that this network can operate with some freedom and flexibility. And I think corporations can put net centricity actually into place in a structured way and they'll find themselves with a lot more flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and effectiveness and perhaps most importantly, giving a sense of more meaningfulness and purpose and powerfulness or self-actualization back to the worker. Right, right. As you're speaking the word, I just can't get out of them. I had just trust, right? It's so much about trust and then giving people the power and enabling people the power that you trust to go do the jobs that you've hired them to do and then to the other point that we talked about then as a leader, help them remove roadblocks, give them the tools, do the things that you can do to help them do their job better versus to your point being super prescriptive on the road actions that you wish that they would do and then managing to the completion of the road actions versus the accomplishment of the bigger task. It seems so simple. It's so hard for so many people to grok. It just amazes me that so many folks are unfortunately still stuck in that old paradigm but you can't anymore because everybody's working from home, so you better get with the program. Yeah, and sorry, I have a little frog in my throat but you can't and just to add to what you're saying, I think that the best thing that leaders can do is also expand their understanding of the worker as no longer just coming to work in some kind of bubble. They're coming to work with all kinds of personal situations and I've had clients who have sort of tried to get away from that and keep the worker in a bubble and I think to be successful as we get through this sort of long-term leadership crisis, I think it's important to lean into the chaos, lean into the complexities that COVID, the pandemic, the economic situation bring and see the corporation and their role as leaders as trying to help that whole person with the complexities of their life as opposed to trying to divorce them from their life because that has not worked and what works best and I've seen this over and over again is that companies that lean into the crisis embrace it and really try to help that whole employee who's coming to work in their house really, really works very well. Yeah, it's going to be interesting as we come out of the summer and go back into the fall which is the traditional season of kids going back to school and everybody kind of going back to work and in our world conferences and it's kind of the ramp up of busy activity until we get kind of to the Christmas season again coming off of summer. Now knowing that this isn't a temporary situation, this isn't going away anytime soon. And I mean, we used to talk about the new normal in March or April and May, we'll now talking about the new normal in September, October, November and into 2021 is a whole different deal. So to your point, I think that's a great tip. Lean in, do the best you can, learn from the experts. You don't need to do it by yourself. There's lots of documentation out there. Darren Murph has stuff out from GitHub or excuse me, GitLab. There's a lot of good information. So you do have to kind of buy into it and embrace it because it's not going away. So these are great tips, Karen. I'll give you the last word before we sign off. All of the work you've done, all the clients you've worked with, couple, two or three really good nuggets that are really simple things that everybody should be thinking about and doing today. I think there's the Waldorf schools out by you on the West Coast, right? Have a motto that they use for education. And it says, in through the heart, out through the mind. And I think more than ever, leadership and business can borrow that idea. I think we have to sort of look at things in through the heart and then distribute our directions and our leadership out through the mind. At the end of the day, we're all human beings that are all struggling in this shared experience, something that has literally never happened on planet Earth with 8 billion people connected through technology with a global pandemic. And so if we kind of can make a shift and think about taking things in through the heart and then delivering out through the mind, I think that a lot of people will feel that compassion and that will translate into the kind of trust that we're trying to build between all of us to get through it together. And I think when we do that, and I have a lot of confidence in the human spirit that we will get through it. People will be able to look back and say, yes, this was very difficult and horrific on many levels, but at the end of the day, maybe there's a little bit of a renaissance in how we sort of look at each other and treat each other with compassion and some love and joy, even in the worst of times. I think that translates over any communication medium, including the one we're using today. Well, Karen, thank you for the time and thank you for closing this with a little bit of light. Congrats again on the book, The Power of Virtual Distance. I'm sure it's available everywhere. And again, great to see you. Thank you so much, Jeff. You too. Take care. She's Karen. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.