Bonding and Bridging Connections in Nature with Carson Tate Part 1 (of 2)
“Your mind is free and your body is moving well and you’re out in nature and it’s a wonderful experience.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Carson
Carson serves as a consultant and executive coach to executives at Fortune 500 companies including (but not limited to) AbbVie, Deloitte, FedEx, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Heinz, Synchrony and Wells Fargo. The author of Work Simply: Embracing the Power of Your Personal Productivity Style (Penguin Portfolio, 2015) and Own It. Love It. Make It Work: How to Make Any Job Your Dream Job (McGraw-Hill, 2020) her views have been included in top-tier business media including Bloomberg Businessweek, Business Insider, CBS Money Watch, Fast Company, Forbes, Harvard Business Review blog, The New York Times, USA Today, Working Mother and more. Carson is also the creator of the Productivity Style Assessment®, a professional tool featured in Harvard Business Review’s 2017 Guide to Being More Productive. Prior to starting Working Simply, she worked in Human Resources and sales functions with Fortune 200 firms. Carson holds a BA in psychology from Washington and Lee University, a Masters in Organization Development, and a Coaching Certificate from the McColl School of Business at Queens University.
Running as a metaphor for life
“So I actually ran cross country in undergrad. So running and being outside has always been really important to me, but it’s also been a little bit of a metaphor for life. Like any good course, there are uphills and downhills. My career, like anyone else's, has had the uphill’s and downhills and wonderful flat straightaways.
But I started my career in banking and human resources, and then went into outside sales and got to work for a big pharma company. And that is where the entrepreneurial itch was formed, because when I worked in Big Pharma, they hired you and gave you three things: a credit card, a cell phone, and a car. Go! And coming out of financial services which was very structured world, that freedom and accountability for building a business was extraordinary. So I loved that work, and it was there that I had the idea to start Working Simply. So one reason I was successful in sales was because I was organized and I could communicate. And I figured out: how do you make sure that you are giving your clients what they need in a very efficient way? You do what you say you're going to do. My team started asking me questions, I started (now that I know what it's called) coaching and consulting on the side. I didn't know that's what I was doing at that point. And when they started to be successful, I realized there was probably a business here around how to be more efficient, more productive, and really be engaged in your work. And so I started that business over 10 years ago. And since I've written two books Work Simply on productivity and my newest one, Own It. Love it. Make it work. on employee engagement.”
sense of freedom
“I am directionally challenged. So there were many a time when I ended up running a lot longer and further than I wanted to because I couldn't quite figure out how to get myself back to the starting point. But running has always been that sense of freedom. You get there on a good run day when things are going really well and feel good. Your mind is kind of free and your body is moving well and you're out in nature, it’s a wonderful experience. And that's where I frequently go if I’m working on a problem or something. Figuring it out with an idea run is usually the best way for me to work that out.”
Trends
“So there are three interesting trends that I'm seeing that other folks are saying. One, we haven't had such significant changes in how we work since the Industrial Revolution. And it happened in a matter of weeks, not months, years, and days. So the rate of change was exponential and compressed. Then the second thing that happened is the push to remote work for knowledge workers. It strengthened, interestingly, something called bonding connections and these are the connections that we have within our team.
Initially, in the pandemic, the data showed those strengthened.. we relied on each other, we knew each other, we trusted each other. What broke down and is still struggling, are something called bridging connections. And these are connections between you and members of different teams. So for example, let's say I'm on the marketing team, my relationship with the finance team in this remote world broke down. And what that had caused is a breakdown in innovation. Because these bridging connections are what are required for sparking new ideas. And we thought about this, what are you seeing? How can we work together? And those bonding and bridging connections, in addition to the loss of social support around child care, and no boundaries, no physical boundaries, again, for knowledge workers, exacerbated an existential crisis. The workers are saying, he worked really hard early on - productivity was through the roof. And now we're wondering, at what cost.”
Bonding and bridging
“I was thinking about a run Wednesday morning in an urban area, and thinking about gardens and flowers that I saw along the way. So that to me would be a team, right? They are all getting their water working off of each other. Bridging connections to me…are the trees and the root systems of trees, and how they go deep and really broad. There was a movie where there was this planet, and nature talks to each other through these pathways, which is what you're talking about. I think we can see this in science fiction. And I think you can see this in root systems. We need to stretch ourselves out into our communities and into our workplaces more to make these connections.”
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