How to create cultures of collaboration and connection with Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen

60. How to create cultures of collaboration and connection with Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen

Podcast Transcription

Michael Kurland: Hello. I’m Michael Kurland, CEO and co-founder of Branded Group, an award winning facility, maintenance and construction management company that services multi-site commercial properties such as retail restaurants, health care facilities and educational institutions. Welcome to the BeBetter podcast. Each week, I interviewed thought leaders from a variety of industries who will share their stories and the lessons they learn as they strive to be better for their clients, partners, employees and their community. Are you ready to be better? Hello and welcome to another episode of the BeBetter podcast. I’m your host, Michael Kurland. Joining me today are the co-founders of Less Lonely. Ryan Jenkins and Steven Cohen. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Ryan Jenkins: Thanks for having us.

Michael Kurland: Awesome. Thank you for being here. So, Ryan, Steve, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you guys do?

Ryan Jenkins: Yeah. Well, thanks again for having us, and we are the founders of LessLonley.com. We just wrote a book called Connectable, How Leaders Can Move Teams from Isolated to All In. And our business partners, a couple of years ago pre-pandemic, were studying the emerging generation, Generation Z and how they were going to make a splash in the workforce. We discovered that they were the loneliest generation and that troubled us. And so we decided, OK, why is this happening first and foremost? And then second, you know, what can we do to help this generation? So that kicked off our research into the topic of loneliness. And then the pandemic happened. We brought all this loneliness research to our clients thinking, I don’t think humans are ready to talk about loneliness, but let’s see. And turns out everyone was ready. And it blew us away. And so COVID finally has pulled back the curtain on the topic of loneliness and humanity, ready to talk about it. And so we’ve now put together a book. We went and researched over 2000 global workers, worked with 50 leaders and hundreds of organizations to distill all this information, and our goal is to destigmatize loneliness and create more belonging in the workplace and through all this work we found that Gen Z is still the loneliest generation, but by not by much. The organization, merely organization, entry level folks all experience it. And so we’re looking to broach the topic and start creating healthier teams, healthier communities and higher performing organizations through it all.

Michael Kurland: Awesome. Steve, I see you over there shaking your head. So you got anything to add to that?

Steve Van Cohen: The only thing I’ll add is loneliness is one of those topics that no one really wants to talk about, even though everyone should be very aware of how they’re feeling. If they are feeling lonely and leaders and organizations, they aren’t necessarily going above and beyond to try to talk to people about their feelings and emotions and loneliness and anything that might be kind of a sensitive topic. But our book and the work that we’re doing is essentially focused on having more conversations and understanding this really, really common emotional state because it has a direct impact on our productivity and morale and retention and our well-being, both physical and emotional. That’s a really big deal that’s flying really under the radar. So Ryan and I have spent a few years now really diving into this and the further we get into our research and understanding, the more blown away our brains get because it’s just such an interesting and fascinating topic.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, I was excited to get you guys on because for me, I’ve experienced it myself and I’m the CEO of a 135 person organization. It wasn’t always that big, but even when we were a 20 person organization, I was super lonely. I was isolated because I kind of isolated myself in one aspect because I moved from New York to California to open my company eight years ago. So I had no real support system. But when I got out here and I spent all the time working on the company, I didn’t spend a lot of time being social. I was in my mid-thirties at the time. And so I had no friends and then I took some time and I started making friends after the first, you know, call it, a year, year and a half. And I had some friends, but those friends were not CEOs, so they didn’t understand my daily life. I’d be like, Hey, I had to fire someone today. And they’re like, I made 100 calls and I did some emails and I’m like, Great, I don’t know how to relate to you, and you don’t know how to relate to me. So, you know, that was something that I definitely experienced. And then to your guys’ point – the pandemic. That was one of my biggest concerns, because I think we have more millennials. I don’t know when Gen Z will start? Maybe we can clarify that.

Ryan Jenkins: Yeah. The year 2022, it’s about 24, 25 years old and younger. We’re in Gen Z.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. So I got quite a few Gen Zers and I got quite a few millennials, right? Because that’s the next step up after Gen Z. So they work for the company and when the pandemic hit, they were living by themselves in an apartment, working from home. And what were they doing? You know, there’s no one to police. Not that they need to be policed, but there’s no parents there. So you’re struggling with loneliness and isolation, and they’re drinking or they’re abusing substances or binge watching Netflix, losing productivity, losing the performance. And it was a real thing that I was worried about and we saw firsthand during the pandemic. So this is really interesting. Sorry, I didn’t mean to go down that whole long wormhole there.

Ryan Jenkins: But no, I think an important distinction to make for the audience is that loneliness isn’t the absence of people, necessarily, it’s the absence of connection. And so to your point there, Michael, when people are at home, yes, they’re not surrounded by people, but oftentimes they can find themselves distanced or disconnected from the work or the culture of the organization. And that’s what we’re trying to do with this conversation and what the book is really trying to make people aware of the science of loneliness, how it impacts our body. But then also really, how do we start creating stronger connections with ourselves, with our team members, with our leaders, with the work itself? And how do we start connecting with more purpose at work? All these things that we have to think about, and that’s why we argue that the workplace is the most fertile ground to tackle loneliness is because there’s so many loneliness lifelines.

Michael Kurland: So let’s backtrack a little bit here. If you guys don’t mind, talk to me about why is Gen Z the most lonely generation? What have you found the reason for that there?

Steve Van Cohen: There are lots of reasons. The three reasons that I’ll talk about, it’s not a surprise, right? And it’s not necessarily because they’re antisocial or because they are uncomfortable talking to other human beings, or they grew up just with technology and they don’t know how to talk to somebody face to face. That’s not it. Essentially, the environment in which they grew up, in which now all of us are living in right. And it’s why they’re the loneliest. But there’s still so many other lonely people that have to do with these three big reasons. The first is what’s called dependency shift. So the dependency shift was 20 years ago. If I needed anything, I depended on other people to help me. Like with something as simple as where do I take my girlfriend out to eat? It’s like, call a friend, be like, Hey, give me an awesome restaurant, or what movie should I go see? Or what album should I pick up or if something breaks? I would go talk to a neighbor like, Dude, I need help. My sink is overflowing. I don’t know what to do now. The amount of dependence we have on each other has gone away. If I need to learn something, I go to YouTube, right? If I need a recommendation on where to eat, I go to Yelp. If I need help with a problem, I go to Google. I no longer need other people to intervene in the things I’m doing every day. And Gen Z, they’re younger than Google, so their entire upbringing had access to all of these different types of resources that are non-human. So they just became less exposed, and they became less dependent. So that’s one big reason. The second big reason is due to busyness, and I was busy as a millennial growing up right, like soccer practice and all the extracurricular clubs and all this, that and the other. But in Jones’s world, they’re even busier because they had a whole bunch of other things to do, and they’re preoccupied with lots of extra homework and pre-work and using technology to communicate through the night versus back in the day when I would call my girlfriend and talk for like an hour on the phone, like a landline phone, that was the email.

Michael Kurland: And then your mom would pick up.

Steve Van Cohen: Yeah and be like Steve what are you doing, go to bed. They didn’t have those restrictions and we’re busier now than ever before in history. So that is another reason. And then the third is what I call the catch of convenience. We live in a world that’s predicated by frictionless experiences, so I don’t need to talk to a barista anymore. If I go to Starbucks, I put in my order online and I just walk in and grab my coffee. I no longer need to go into a restaurant to get food. I no longer need to go to Walmart to buy a toothbrush, right? Like, I live in a world where things can be done for me without any human interaction, and that just means I’m not rubbing as many shoulders with other people. And for Gen Z, right, like they’ve lived in a world of convenience, which is just giving them less exposure, so those are three really big reasons for why they are the loneliest generation on the planet. But those reasons are essentially impacting all of us if we think about why we all might be lonely today in 2022.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, those are all great points. And I never thought about that dependency shift, that is such a huge thing, right? I don’t need to talk to anyone to get anything done anymore. I can just sit in my little Oz chair, right? And make it happen. So can everybody else.
Ryan Jenkins: I’ll give you a good story that relates to this real quick. I’ve got three young children and we have a babysitter that’s a Gen Zer and we were throwing a party at one point and we had the babysitter help us get ready and prepare the food. And as you can imagine, there was a lot going on in the kitchen and my wife handed her a can and a can opener and said, Hey, can you open these up and put these on this plate? And you know, more commotion was happening around the kitchen and a couple of minutes went by and nothing was happening. That can again had not been opened. And turns out, we looked a little bit closer, observed a little closer. She was watching a video and we thought, Oh no, she just got distracted. She’s done with this preparation work, and she wasn’t distracted. She was actually learning. She was on YouTube trying to figure out how to use a manual can opener. And it’s a good example of this dependency shift, right? Instead of just asking real quick or connecting with one of us, she just went to what she knows best and she learned how to use the can opener and then got it done. And that was that, but took a little bit longer. But that’s a small example, but that’s what’s happening with all of us, right? We’re often choosing convenience over connection and it’s slowly tearing us apart. And so in the future, when more and more of this technology is coming at us, we’ve got to be really vigilant now more than ever to fight for more of this connection.

Ryan Jenkins: So totally off topic, but kind of not. What about the metaverse? What’s your thoughts on that? Seriously, what do you think is going to happen when, because, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Ready Player One, but it’s basically in the future where there’s a metaverse and all people just connect in the metaverse and they don’t, it’s kind of scary for me to think that’s where we’re going. But what do you guys think? I’m not trying to talk about NFTs and all that other stuff. I just think, like, do you think that is going to be the biggest thing that we’re going to fight against for connection in the coming years?

Steve Van Cohen: It’s a big problem. As I think about the future, I’m really scared. I’m really scared, man. So I’ll tell you a story. I have a client, I do a lot of executive coaching and we were having a conversation and he goes off topic. I had this really weird experience the other day, and I don’t know what to do about it. And I said, Well, I’m interested. Tell me all about it, you know? And he said his daughter had some friends over and there were these four girls and they’re all teenagers. So I think they were like 13, 14 years old. And he said, I came downstairs and the four of them were all on their devices, texting with each other together like they’re together in person and they’re using their devices to text each other versus have a conversation face to face. And he goes, What do I do? And I go, Dude, I don’t know, man, that’s the future. And right like that is scary. And if you tack on avatars without feet floating around in the metaverse, living this amazing fake life that is so easy and convenient. I don’t think that bodes well for the future humans that are going to be coming into play here. So I’m scared, man. I know Ryan’s got his own thoughts on it, but for me, I think it’s a big deal.

Ryan Jenkins: Yeah, it is. I mean, we have to tread very lightly, and we’ve got indicators now of how technology can pull us away from each other. But technology is useful. You know, Steve and I always use the example, like if we gave you a button, a big red button that said delete the internet on it, would you push that button even though the internet gives us a lot of headaches at times? Most of the people, probably 95 percent of people we asked, would never push that button because there’s just enough benefits that outweigh the risks. So we continue to adopt technology. And you know, that’s likely going to happen with the metaverse. There’s going to be useful things for it. But I think we’ve all experienced how these devices are putting subtle divides between us. You know, if I put my kids in front of a screen for any length of time, they basically lose their capacity for emotional intelligence. They have a really hard time regulating their emotions after they get removed from a screen. And so, you know, yes, there’s ways for us to connect in these environments. We’ve all experienced it when we had to be six feet away and not be in the same office together, like we can use these tools to connect, but it’s just not the same. And I don’t think any of us, all of us are wildly underestimating how much we need human connection. And so again, that’s why we love having conversations like this, because we want to emphasize we want to put multiple exclamation marks around conversations like this because we are just wildly underestimating how much we need human connection, how fundamental it is for us to operate and to be healthy. And again, that’s why we love having conversations like this. And the Metaverse puts a big pressure on cultivating that healthy human connection that so much, so much of us. All of us. Yeah.

Michael Kurland: I don’t have any children yet, but that’s on the horizon in the coming years. And I’m scared shitless, you know, because I don’t know how to, you know, you think about it, right? Because I don’t want to get too far off topic with this, but I thought it was important to touch on. But you think about, you know, there’s going to be all these outside influences. And I don’t think a lot of parents are probably thinking like the three of us are thinking, Right, that kid, you need to not be so attached to your device and you need to regulate your emotions when you get off your device time. There’s probably some parents who are like, Here you go, kid, like play on the iPad and just be quiet while I do whatever I’m doing, right? And so when they go to school, are they going, Oh, you’re a loser because you’re not in the Metaverse? I mean, the kids got enough to worry about as a student right, and Metaverse bullying.

Steve Van Cohen: It’s on the horizon. Get your kids ready. Ryan and I had this conversation, I think it’s so interesting. I’m thirty seven. I’m the wise one. He’s 36. He’s still a young pup. Lots to learn in the world here. But we had this conversation. We said, have you ever, at any point in time through any of your schooling, learned how important it is that we actually have meaningful connections with the people around us, like that’s never been taught, ever. I’ve never learned the biology of why we are wired to connect and why it’s a social species. It’s so important that the connections we have with each other are robust and meaningful, right and rooted in a sense of trust and belonging. That’s never been a conversation, ever, that I’ve had. And if we don’t start to have that conversation and if people don’t, especially parents of parents who don’t really understand the significance of their kids not feeling fully seen and connected with their peers, it’s going to be a disastrous situation. So if you look at the statistics, we started to unpack loneliness during the pandemic, but some of our research that we uncovered is really scary. Like in 2018, 61 percent of Americans said that they feel regularly lonely. So that’s pre-pandemic, and in 2017, it was seven percent lower. During the pandemic, it shot up over 72 percent. So you are seeing a very, very steady line that is just continuously going up. And unless there is a seismic change in how we interact or how we just differentiate values and put certain importance on certain things, that’s just going to continue to grow in the wrong direction. And it’s a bad situation.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, I will just touch on what I did in school at Lynchburg University now, Lynchburg College in Virginia. We took a class called Communications, and Dr. Jimmy Drew, a great communications teacher. He told me, he told the class, you’re going to go to an old person’s home and you have to connect with one of the people in the old person’s home. And unfortunately for me, I got the guy that told me he wanted to die because his wife had been dead for 30 years and all. He was just waiting to die. And I was like, Could I get somebody else, please? So that connection didn’t go so well. But then I read a book, and I hope you guys have read this book Tribe by Sebastian Junger, that is exactly what you’re talking about, Steve. Just like, you know why we connect, why we need to connect and like why as a species, it’s so important for us to connect. So audience, I know you’ve heard me talk about it numerous times, so I highly recommend it again. So let’s backtrack even more, how did you guys meet and why did you decide like, Hey, Ryan, hey Steve, let’s start studying loneliness. Where did this come from? Let’s talk about that.

Ryan Jenkins: Yes, we were both really consultants and trainers, and for the last decade I had been a keynote speaker and working with audiences all around the world, all kinds of industries. But my lane was around generations and that’s where the study of Generation Z and then discovering that they were really lonely. And Steve is a training guru. And so he saw this big opportunity with a lot of the clients that he was working with at training. You know, learning development needs to be updated because these emerging generations there, they need something new. And so we connected online. Steve brought this idea that, hey, how can we refresh training to deliver something more sophisticated and better to our clients? And so I brought the expertise on what the emerging generation wanted. He brought expertise on how to effectively deliver learning and development for corporations. So that kicked off our partnership. And then, you know, how we landed on loneliness was again looking at Generation Z and we again, we didn’t. We weren’t going to, we didn’t have any plans to explore it. But all of our clients wanted to talk about it whenever they came to us and they wanted X, Y or Z. And then we just told him a little bit about the project around loneliness that we’re working on. All their attention went right to that project. They thought, that’s what I want. So we knew we had something here. And so we put together a book proposal shop that was a feeding frenzy. So we just kept getting affirmation after affirmation, after affirmation that people were finally ready to talk about this. And here we are. The book just came out and we’re excited to really start having this conversation.

Michael Kurland: Ryan, you are a segue artist. Let’s talk about the book. It’s a big week right, book drop this week called Connectable How Leaders Can Move Teams from isolated to all in. Is that correct? All right, let’s talk about. That’s awesome. Congrats on the book, guys. And let’s talk about the book.

Steve Van Cohen: It’s the world’s greatest book that’s ever been written. You talked about Tribes and tribes here. This book, Michael, is like a tribe on steroids, man. And I can’t wait. Tribe 4.0, it’s cool. So the book breaks down a few important things in a few different arenas. So we wrote it specifically for leaders in organizations because we feel like from the research and we know from what we have uncovered that work is the best place to lessen loneliness for a whole bunch of reasons. And even though we’re not wanting leaders to be therapists or psychologists or start to diagnose any kind of loneliness or mental health problems, leaders have these single greatest opportunity to create more connection within their teams. So we wrote it to that audience. However, we created a tone within the book that essentially will allow anybody who is either feeling lonely or wants to help somebody they know feel less lonely to read and say, Yeah, there’s so many strategies and examples and stories in here that I could really start to benefit from. So we begin with unpacking loneliness, why it’s happening. We have a section called the abandoned of belonging. So why do we feel not as close with other people that we interact with? And then we have a whole bunch of chapters on strategies. So what are the really fundamental things you can start doing in order to create more connection in your life and at work? And we use examples like cocaine and ATMs and wooly mammoths and Red Sox fans in Chicago, commuters and astronauts, and all these really weird, wacky examples that we came across to help create these ties that people will remember and hopefully find some solace in. So that’s a high level overview of the book. Ryan, anything else that you want to add about it?

Ryan Jenkins: Yeah, oftentimes when you think about loneliness, you think, Oh, what a gloomy topic, and this book isn’t gloomy, it’s illuminating, and we’ve put 50 original illustrations that are humorous in the book. So we wanted to make this very accessible for everybody. And we wanted to change the tone and change the conversation as it relates to loneliness. And so the book is going to give you everything you need, but we created all these other tools. So in the book, there’s a self-assessment. We also created the world’s first team assessment, where you can figure out how connected your team is and it’s empirically validated. We work with researchers out of Harvard and University of Canterbury, University of Alabama. So it is chock full with really actual stuff to really move the needle on this. And our goal is to just create healthier organizations that spill out into healthier communities and ultimately a healthier humanity.

Michael Kurland: A few things I want to go back and touch on. So why is work the best place to attack this?

Steve Van Cohen: It’s so strange the way that people respond to loneliness. So loneliness, we equate it to hunger, right? Hunger is a biological cue that you need to eat. And when you’re hungry, what do you do? You grab an apple, you put some sustenance in your body, and that emotional request is essentially granted. Loneliness is essentially just biology, it’s nature’s way of saying you need to forge a connection. It’s a reminder that you need to feel more connected with the people around you. But instead of just reaching out to somebody to feel that connection, people resort inward. They move away from others because loneliness is a shameful feeling. And if someone’s feeling lonely, oftentimes they create this downward spiral of like, I’m unloved and unwanted. I’ve tried to connect with people they don’t want to connect with me. I’m already feeling this way. I don’t want to feel worse. So they move in the wrong direction, which is why loneliness compounds and becomes really difficult to get out of. The reason that work is the single greatest place for people to feel less lonely is because you have to show up, like you have to interact with other people. You can’t just be in like an aloneness cave in your room under your covers alone, like you have loneliness lifelines in the form of your boss, your clients, the team members write all these other just touch points of human beings. So when the team leader knows what to look for, they could pull you out from this deep, dark place of loneliness, which is oftentimes what people need because it’s hard for them to get out by themselves.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, sorry. Go ahead Ryan.

Ryan Jenkins: I’ll add to that, you know, work is where we spend the most time of our waking hours so that’s a good place to start, right? And then also to do the work creates routine. So that’s often helpful. And there’s also learning. Steven, I’ve discovered that learning lessons, loneliness is kind of similar to, you know, if you’re experiencing gratitude, you can’t be angry. And the same flight, if you’re learning and you’re enthralled in something, you can’t be lonely. So those are some other aspects that really help you to lessen loneliness. And the last thing I would say is purpose, right? If you have purpose in your work and if you feel really connected to your work because again, it’s not the absence of people, it’s the absence of connection. So if you can find purpose and that draws you into the work that lessens loneliness too. So work is just chock full of all these lonely lives.

Michael Kurland: Totally. And we’ve done or I don’t think we’ve done the research, but we’ve seen the research where if you give, I believe it’s millennials a purpose, they will actually stay and take less money to stay in the workplace. So we’ve found that which helps our retention rate, which is something you guys brought up earlier and I think is a very underrated statistic for all employers. Your retention rate should be the number one focus of what you’re trying to accomplish. Besides, your number two focus, obviously whatever you’re selling or bringing to the table. But this is all great information. So you also dropped the podcast in the past month. So talk about that real quick. It’s called the Case for Connection. So tell the audience about the podcast and where should they be tuning in for this?

Ryan Jenkins: Yeah if you go to lesslonley.com/podcast, you can find the podcasts there or wherever you listen to podcasts, search “the case for connection” and it’s we did a full season where we unpack a lot of the really fascinating research that Steve and I unpacked. So it’s just Steve and I having really fun, impromptu conversations. So we uncovered some really interesting research. Then we react to it. You know, what does this mean? How do we interpret this? And then we give a response. What are we going to do or what should listeners be thinking about as it relates to forging more connections in our life? So it’s a lot of fun.

Michael Kurland: Did you guys reach the topic of cocaine in the book? Because I’m still curious about that.

Steve Van Cohen: Yes, there is an entire episode dedicated to cocaine. The cocaine research that was done by these two M.I.T. scientists, and they were wanting to research the impacts of withdrawals from some of the drugs. But in the research, they inadvertently found these neurons in our brain that are responding to the isolation of these mice who are being removed from the substance. And they accidentally literally found the part of our brain that registers loneliness. And it’s created all kinds of really interesting sub-studies that talk about biology and how our brains are responding to this sensation and why it’s so significant. So if you’re interested in mice and cocaine and brains, episode one of the case for connection is really up your alley.

Michael Kurland: Oh that was the lead off, the jump off episode. I love it. This is great. So gentlemen, it’s really been great having you on the show. I enjoyed our conversation. I want to get you guys to just tell the audience a few things. If you could tell them the name of your website again, just so they have it. If you could tell them the name of your book and where they can get it, and again the name of the podcast and where they can listen to it. That would be awesome.

Ryan Jenkins: You can find us at less lonely dot com. The name of the book is about how leaders can move teams from isolate to all, then you can find that wherever books are sold. The podcast is the case for connection. Find that wherever you listen to podcasts and then fourth, you didn’t ask for this. Michael Burnham, throw it in there. Steve and I have been very active all over social. We’re giving tons of connection tips on any social platform, including TikTok. And you can find us all on the platforms at Ryan and Stephen. So thanks for letting us shoppers out.

Michael Kurland: Gentlemen, it’s been great and audiences until next time. Thank you for tuning in. I hope that today’s episode inspired you to become a purpose driven leader in your career or your community. There’s no doubt that when we lead with purpose, we can change lives. If you enjoyed today’s show, I’d be grateful if you would take a moment to rate us on your preferred listening platform to learn more about Branded Groups better experience and how we provide industry leading On-Demand facility maintenance, construction management and special project implementation. Visit us at www.branded-group.com. Be sure to follow us on social media and you can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Until next time, be better.