Asking people a question
I had lunch today in central London with a new work colleague. I wanted to welcome her to the organisation and get to know her better. Although we both now live and work in the capital, we are both Northerners – she from York and me from Manchester – and people from the North have a reputation (rightly, I believe) for being friendlier than Southerners. She commented to me on how people in London do not engage as easily as they do in her home town.
So I was really interested in this story which was drawn to my attention later today by another friend – in fact someone else who, like me, used to live in Manchester and now lives down south. You may at first think the story is not relevant to you: the subject is a young American who asks some quite challenging questions.
But I believe that we all can and should engage more with colleagues at work and people we meet in our everyday life. All it takes is a simple, open-ended question such as “How are you?” “How’s your day day been so far?” “What’s new?”. But then we have to be prepared to really listen and genuinely empathise.