From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
Ask anyone who has joined a new team in a new country what made it feel like home, and they rarely mention the technology. They mention a person. Today's guest has built her whole approach to work around that truth.
The idea
Emilia Salhotra is a digital transformation and change leader based in the UAE, originally from Metro Detroit, who has spent the last seven years leading complex HR and digital change in Dubai.
We talked about what keeps teams connected when they are spread across countries and time zones, and her answer was refreshingly unsentimental.
She has heard the criticism that we lose our culture when we work in distributed ways, and her response was that culture does not evaporate on its own, it simply needs tending.
“if you seek that connection in a purposeful, surgical, intentional way, you'll be able to foster it”,
she told me.
The phrase purposeful, surgical, intentional has stayed in my notebook ever since. Her own story proves the point.
When she arrived in the UAE it took her two and a half years to feel completely at home, and she credits friendships with her clients, people cheering for her in her corner, as the reason she is still there.
One of her very first clients still takes a fifteen minute catch up call with her. On technology, she is an advocate for using it to create shared experience rather than shared screens. Her favourite example came from her own family.
She lives in the UAE with a toddler, her mother lives in Michigan, and both of them own the same copy of a baby beluga book. They take turns reading pages to her son and to her young nephew, jointly, across the distance.
It builds connection between her and her mother and between the two children at the same time. She also told me about a friend whose mother gave French cooking lessons over video during the pandemic, turning a season that could have been isolating into one of her favourite memories.
Her larger argument is that technology should be democratised, and that gaming can be left to be gaming and borrowed for team building, whether that is a Mario Kart competition or rehearsing a response to a hazardous scenario together.
What I took from it
I left my corporate life in London and rebuilt my working world from Canada, so her two and a half years to feel at home made me exhale. That is roughly how long it took me too, and nobody warns you.
What I admired most was her refusal to leave connection to chance. When I moved here in 2021 I assumed relationships would form naturally the way they had when I was younger, and they did not, not because people stopped caring but because nobody designed the moments where caring could happen.
Her baby beluga story also undid me a little, because I know exactly what it is to raise children far from the people who love them.
Three things to try this week
- Book one fifteen minute connection call this week with someone who once helped you feel at home, the way Emilia's first client still does with her, and keep it short on purpose.
- Design one shared experience instead of a catch up. Read the same book to a distant child, cook the same recipe over video, or play one short game together, and let the experience do the connecting.
- Choose one team moment and make it intentional. Rather than hoping a meeting creates warmth, add one purposeful element to it, a question round, a small win shared, or a two minute story.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you her examples in her own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Emilia Salhotra on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
If her phrase purposeful, surgical, intentional describes the kind of leader you want to be, the next stage of that journey is the Social Health in Professional Leadership Certification . Which moment in your week would you redesign first?