{"id":1753,"date":"2010-02-05T18:14:52","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T17:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1753"},"modified":"2010-02-05T18:14:52","modified_gmt":"2010-02-05T17:14:52","slug":"asking-people-a-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1753","title":{"rendered":"Asking people a question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; she from York and me from Manchester &#8211; 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.<br \/>\nSo I was really interested in <a href=\"http:\/\/buildabetterworkplace.com\/2010\/01\/31\/walmart\/\">this story<\/a> which was drawn to my attention later today by another friend &#8211; 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.<br \/>\nBut 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 &#8220;How are you?&#8221; &#8220;How&#8217;s your day day been so far?&#8221; &#8220;What&#8217;s new?&#8221;. But then we have to be prepared to really listen and genuinely empathise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; she from York and me from Manchester &#8211; and people from the North have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}