People choose to work with people they like and trust. It’s all about relationships and chemistry.
When did you last want to collaborate or team up with someone you did not like? When do you think they last did so?
We can explore and in part explain the science of such decision-making, put it into a modern digital context, and we can consider the impacts of fast-changing professional environments.
We can hint at how brains “like” and what that means. We can investigate how they assess trustworthiness and manage associations, how consistency and the peak-end rule help determine impressions. We can gauge how digital hygiene and digital personas influence perceptions, how AIs change the skills profiles that matter most, and reveal human foibles.
Ask yourself how much time you spent preparing for the personal aspect of your last meeting. How much time did you spend thinking about the person, so you could engage informally as well as professionally?
How easily can you sustain an informal conversation, staying off the agenda? When we reduce tension and raise openness and collaboration, what happens to our effectiveness as co-worker? It increases hugely. This can be the greatest single source of competitive edge we’re ever likely to have in the course of our careers.