How is your day going? Are you following all the news about the fires in Los Angeles? Awful, right? How about where you are – How’s the weather? And how’s your family?
You’ve probably heard (or asked) some version of these questions in the last week – either at the beginning of a meeting, or one-on-one in person or online. And we’ve probably all also been part of a meeting where someone has said there’s “no time for small talk,” and “we have to get to the important stuff.” As you may have found, though – “the important stuff” is often what divides us.
Small talk is a lot less challenging, but because of that it often gets diminished as unimportant – and team building programs like the ones Building Bridges Leadership offers are guilty of this too, by focusing on ice breaker questions and “connection before content” over small talk. But, as many of us discovered during Covid, when the opportunity for small talk disappears, you might have to work more intentionally on building connections.
Small talk is a social lubricant. In a conversation between business leadership author Simon Sinek and comedian and political commentator Trevor Noah, Sinek noted that Noah isn’t a small talk kind of guy; their conversations always go very deep very fast. But Noah balked, saying that he is a huge fan of small talk, and that it’s only through small talk that his conversations go deep, and I think his reasoning is worth paying attention to: “We don’t realize that small talk is what connects us as people and big talk is what separates us. So if you have the foundation of a lot of small talk, you find similarities, you exist in the same realities. But then if you only have big talk, then it’s like large ideas [that it’s hard to see together]. So when you go, ‘Man, the weather,’ the other person goes like, ‘Yeah, I can’t believe how beautiful it is.’ And you’re like, ‘I know. Right?’ Or you go, ‘The weather, it’s just it’s been raining.
When is it gonna stop?’ ‘I know. Right?’ In that moment, it’s the craziest thing ever: You have literally created reality that you share, and now it’s easier to say, ‘How do you plan to vote?'” [Emphasis added.] In other words, it greases the wheels for further conversations about bigger topics – by finding something you already agree on, it reminds you both of your shared humanity as a context for your discussion.
Noah’s idea that small talk is a way to create a shared reality could also be considered building a bridge between their life and yours, and meeting them on that bridge. As simple as that is, I think it’s profoundly important – and both easy to forget, but also easy to put back into practice dozens of times a day.
And it doesn’t even have to involve conversations about the weather! In a Social Psychological and Personality Science study, Psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn found that brief social interactions between customers at a coffee shop with their baristas resulted in feelings of belonging and increased happiness on both sides. These weren’t necessarily conversations longer than a couple of words! In most cases, these came simply through smiling, making eye contact and briefly acknowledging the other person and wishing them a good day. Does that mean these people then had longer “big talk” conversations? No, not necessarily. But increased feelings of belonging and happiness are not a bad result either. And again, it builds that bridge to be able to see something “bigger” together.
This Week’s Tip:
Look for the value in small talk, and make time for small talk with more people – both at work and elsewhere in your day. Pay attention to the various moments of interaction you have with people during the course of your day – how many of them involve small talk? How many opportunities do you have to acknowledge another person, smile, and make eye contact; to acknowledge your shared humanity? For the small talk conversations you already have, notice if you have a tendency to rush past them to the “important stuff,” and notice what happens if you stay in the small talk a little longer before that. See what happens when you engage in more small talk with your team – see what you learn about them, and what they learn about you.
Try this out this week, and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear from you!
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