Social Connection: The Competitive Edge of Human Relationships

Future Competences for Leaders and Changemakers

Mar 31, 2025

Future Competencies for Leaders and Changemakers is a series designed to help you develop the critical skills needed to address today’s most pressing challenges, navigate complexity, inspire action, and drive meaningful change. It highlights essential skills and practical exercises to strengthen them—including those that are often overlooked or not yet fully recognised for their value.

Skill #1: Futures Literacy: The Art of Making Use of Tomorrow
Skill #2: Being: The Most Underrated Future Skill
Skill #3: Inner Development: The Bridge Between Business and Personal Growth
Skill #4: Deep Listening: The Future Demands an Ancient Skill
Skill #5: Breathing: Regulating Your Day with Simplicity
Skill #6: Creativity: Real-World Problem Solving
Skill #7: Meaning: The Competitive Advantage of Creating Purpose
👉 Skill #8: Social Connection: The Competitive Edge of Human Relationships

In our digital-first world obsessed with technical skills, we overlook a profound truth: genuinely connecting with others may be the most valuable professional skill.

Working remotely has made me feel the power of personal connections more intensely than ever. While I'm beyond grateful for access to brilliant people globally—a true privilege of our connected era—I've discovered that meeting in person carries irreplaceable value.

While we're busy upskilling in data analysis and digital marketing, research shows that strong social connections don't just make work more pleasant—they fundamentally transform our performance, wellbeing, and career trajectory.

The Hidden Power of Human Connection

Consider these striking findings:

Employees with a best friend at work are seven times more engaged than their isolated peers1
Strong workplace relationships increase job satisfaction, lead to more promotions, and reduce turnover2
Beyond professional benefits, robust social connections increase survival likelihood by 50%, regardless of cause of death3
Conversely, loneliness increases early mortality risk by 26%—comparable to obesity or smoking4

As our workplace environments become increasingly fluid—with remote work, constant team reshuffling, and cross-functional projects—the ability to quickly establish meaningful connections becomes indispensable.

Why Connection Is Harder Than Ever

Today's environment presents three significant obstacles to building meaningful relationships:

1. The Time Barrier

Our brains use time as a key factor when deciding whether to help others. Our constantly "busy" culture treats connection as a luxury rather than a necessity.
My article on Time Wealth might provide you a more profound perspective on the topic.

2. The Distance Barrier

Remote and hybrid work models eliminate the spontaneous interactions that traditionally formed the foundation of workplace relationships.

3. The Us/Them Barrier

Our brains naturally categorise people as either part of our "in-group" or as outsiders. With constantly shifting teams and roles, we must continuously recategorise colleagues to overcome this instinct.

Five Practical Ways to Strengthen Your Connection Skills

The good news? Building rapport is a learnable skill, not an innate talent. Here's how to develop it:

1. Practice Deep Listening

The next time you're conversing, try this exercise: for two full minutes, ask only open-ended questions and resist the urge to share your experience or offer solutions. Focus entirely on understanding the speaker's emotional state, not just their words. This creates space for others to feel emotionally understood—a rare gift in our interruption-heavy culture. Here you can find my guide to deep listening.

2. Find Specific Commonalities

When meeting someone new, move beyond general demographic questions. Instead, ask about specific interests, challenges they're facing, or unique experiences. Discovering you both love the same obscure podcast or faced similar childhood challenges creates stronger bonds than surface-level small talk.

3. Practice Time Wealth

Counterintuitively, giving time to others can make us feel less time-constrained ourselves. Challenge yourself to offer a colleague one minute of your focused attention each day. Research shows even brief moments of connection significantly reduce another person's anxiety and build trust.

4. Choose Synchronous Communication

When building new relationships, prioritise real-time interaction. Research shows friendly interactions that happen synchronously (video, phone, in-person) generate significantly more positive responses than asynchronous ones (email, text).

5. Shift From "How Would I Feel?" to "How Would They Feel?"

Practice mature empathy by regularly asking yourself: "How would they feel experiencing this?" rather than "How would I feel?" This subtle shift helps bridge the us/them divide and creates an authentic connection.

The Competitive Advantage of Connection

As automation and AI handle increasingly complex tasks, our uniquely human capacity for meaningful connection becomes more valuable. Those who master rapid rapport will build more resilient support networks, collaborate more effectively, and access more opportunities through stronger professional relationships.

The question isn't whether you can afford to develop your social connection skills. It's whether you can afford not to.

My own journey has taught me that while digital connections are powerful and enable global collaboration, there's a special alchemy that happens when we share physical space. This is why, alongside my remote work, I've made 1:1 coaching sessions a cornerstone of my offers and am actively developing opportunities to facilitate in-person gatherings. In shared spaces, connections deepen in ways that screens simply cannot replicate.

I believe the future belongs to those who can seamlessly navigate both digital and physical connection—understanding when each serves best and how to maximise the unique benefits of both.

We’re in this together! ✨
Graziella

What connection challenges do you face in your work environment? How do you balance digital and in-person interactions? I'd love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

Gallup (2022). The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work. [online] Gallup.com. Available at: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx.

Harvard Business Review. (2018). America’s Loneliest Workers, According to Research. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2018/03/americas-loneliest-workers-according-to-research.

Schnall, Simone, et al. (2008) Social Support and the Perception of Geographical Slant. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 5, Sept. 2008, pp. 1246–1255, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.04.011.