Working in tech gives me the opportunity to play with some of the latest communication apps and tools.  In the past couple of years a few products have sprung on the scene that are revolutionizing the way individuals and teams communicate and collaborate, such as Slack, Trello, Mural, and Microsoft Whiteboard, along with better versions of Box, Webex and Zoom.  There are many more but these are the ones I use at IBM that I didn’t 2-3 years ago.  Yet recently, in spite of all these great tools, I am finding that the advice I’m giving to my team and following myself is a bit more old school: pick up the phone and make a call.

Here are three recent scenarios where I believe making a phone call led to a better outcome than using technology would have led to (yes, I’m considering a phone call to not be “technology”):

1. Due to a small re-org a few people joined my team of direct reports.  I asked one of them to partner with a person from my original team on a small but important initiative.  The two of them live/work in different cities and are generally quite different individuals, yet both deliver great results in their own unique ways.  There was a bit of conflict which I attributed to style issues.  I suggested to one of them to pick up the phone and call the other with the goal of building a personal relationship by sharing backgrounds and talking about how to approach the initiative.  That one phone call led to a much better working relationship and overall a better end-product.
2. Like many workplaces we’re going through a significant transformation in multiple parts of the business.  I’m specifically driving a global initiative on the private cloud technology IBM developers use to do their work.  I received a fairly scathing email from one of my customers who was legitimately annoyed at the churn we were causing by asking his team to transition to a new platform which ended with him stating he was not going to continue to work with us.  I could have responded to his email with a lengthy response addressing his issues but instead responded and offered to set up a call to discuss.  On that call I empathized with the situation, gave him context on why we were making these changes, and committed to working with him through the changes.  What was the end result?  He seemed quite positive and committed to working with us.
3. Similar to the previous example, I received an email from a customer with a ton of questions after an unplanned outage.  The email cc’d a couple of executives so I had to tread carefully.  The easy answer was to factually respond to each of the questions via email.  Instead, I set up a call and we talked through the details.  The call was also positive and we were able to identify areas to improve collaboration should a similar incident occur in the future.  I then followed up with an email summary so that the executives were aware that we closed the discussion satisfactorily.

So why is this important for Millennial Leaders, especially those at tech companies and doubly more so for those with employees in a different city/country?  At the end of the day conducting business is a human endeavour.  AI and robots haven’t taken over yet.  This means that we need to keep nurturing interpersonal bonds.  For Millennials and Gen Z’ers who could theoretically live our entire lives – work, social, etc. – through a screen, once in a while we need to put the device away and talk to people in a more personal way in order to deliver great results at work.  Is it easy?  Definitely not, and I’m not perfect at it either.  Sending a quick IM via whatever tool is easy but the goal should be to pick up that phone or walk to someone’s desk.  Try it!