A Simple Exercise to Strengthen Your Group
At a west coast conference, I started chatting with a woman seated next to me. Although we'd never met, we quickly zoned in on the fact that we were both from the Northeast. I asked her where, exactly, she grew up. "Connecticut," she told me. Gee, me too, whereabouts? "New Haven," she said. Really? So was I. "In fact," she added, "I was born in New Haven Hospital." So was I!
It would be a spectacular coincidence to discover we’d been born on the same day, but no, it wasn't even the same year—or, for that matter, the same decade. Still, what are the odds that two people who connect at random have something so life-specific in common? I don't mean the mundane things you find in lists, such as the things successful people have in common or the things interesting people have in common. I mean the more personal things.
While engaged in the squabbles of the typical workday, it's sometimes hard to believe we're alike in any way at all. Yet, almost any two of us have things in common—maybe even lots of things—that we don't know about because we haven't looked or we’ve gotten bogged down in our perceptions and stereotypes of each other. Once two people find something in common, it tends to forge a connection between them, or strengthen their connection if they already have one.
Finding something in common can also help repair relationships that have gone awry. I saw this happen in a striking way years ago while working with four technical groups. Their responsibilities required them to interact extensively, but their relationship was characterized by finger-pointing and fault-finding. The members of each group heaped huge doses of blame on the others. (Alas, they had that in common!) I was advised to keep an eye on two of them, Chris and Lonnie, because they were the fiercest of adversaries.
Near the end of our time together, during a small-group activity in which I placed Chris and Lonnie in the same group, I heard one of them say to the other, "You went to college there? So did I." How the subject came up, I don't know; it certainly wasn't part of the assigned activity. But that's what sometimes happens when people have a chance to interact in a setting that's removed from the one in which they're battling each other.
In this instance, and perhaps for the first time, Chris and Lonnie saw each other not as adversaries, but as human beings—people who had lives separate from their work. They suddenly realized that for all their differences, they also had some things in common. And who knows what else they found they had in common? I couldn't tell because their laughter muffled what they were saying.
The discovery of things in common certainly didn't resolve all the conflict between Chris and Lonnie, or between their groups. It takes a lot more than a facilitated exercise and a few laughs to strengthen damaged relationships and rebuild trust—or to build trust from scratch. These four groups clearly had work to do to improve their communication with each other. But finding things in common was an important starting point.
