Building Change Resilience - Be Socially Connected

Be socially connected

People congregate together, whether it is in a city, church, rock concert or on Facebook! FB is based on the need for people to connect. And love it or hate it, it took less than 8 years for Facebook to become integrated into the global language.

So why do we do feel this need to connect? Primarily, it stems from basic survival instincts. An individual does not have all of the skills to survive alone in nature.

How does being socially connected make us more resilient to change?

It makes us recognise that other people are required to bring the appropriate skills and values to successfully complete a project.  Have you ever spent a couple of days creating a project plan, only to find that Mandla has already created a fantastic template? What takes me a whole day and plenty of yelling at my computer takes Mandla 5 minutes. If I had connected with Mandla, we would have worked together as a team, eliminating any duplication and leveraging each other’s skills to produce the plan.

Being socially connected gives us access to knowledge. Sharing is caring in an environment where things are constantly changing. Knowing ‘what, when who, how and where’ goes a long way to building resilience to upcoming changes. Take the current migrations to AccessAccounts. When I heard Chris Nel speaking about the solid escalation measures in place to address any issues I felt a lot more confident that the migrations would be successful.

Getting socially connected

The good news? If you are a member of a team, a family or golf club you are already socially connected.

The bad news? There is none! Just use existing connections to begin building or extending your networks.

• Use professional engagementslike team meetings, Indabas, Connect Sessions to get introduced
• Your dance, book, scuba or golf clubs can all be used to connect with others in a different way
• Use social media networks for the same thing – LinkedIn is a useful professional network
• Having a quick chat over coffee is a great way to find out about something
• Keeping it simple. Get up from your desk and ask your colleague the question. You’ll see that there are very few that actually bite

Give back

When you help other people and are generous with your knowledge then they will be more inclined to help you. For example if a colleague recommends you on LinkedIn return the favour. Or in another situation you could take 5 minutes to explain an Excel formula etc.

At the end of the day being socially connected means you need to get out there. Introduce yourself, take an interest and be involved. The result is that you will find that like you, colleagues are more than willing to share knowledge and skills to get the job done faster.

Elevator Speech

Having a clear 2 – 3 sentence of who you are and what you do will make a better impression when you first meet someone. You can practice on your friends first if you are shy. Try this exercise:

Imagine being in an elevator and you have 30 seconds to tell Hannah Sadiki who you are, what you do and what your skills are. For example

“I am Sibongele Nkosi. I work in Internal Communications for Channel. We produce all the ‘Blue Matter’ scripts and ‘Heart-to-Heart’. I can turn a 100 page presentation into 1 page”

Want to know more?

Online material

Ted Talks - The Hidden Influence of Social Networks 

Ted Talks - The Tribes We Lead  

Blog - Happiness Is Being Socially Connected 

Blog - Allowing For Social Media in The Workplace

Share your experience about being socially connected in the workplace or you can even create and post your Elevator Speech below – make it as fun and outrageous as you like!