Here Are Their Top Three Strategies

I began the year with a goal: interview between 50 and 100 leaders — from musicians to Instagram influencers to CEOs to social workers — and ask this deceptively simple question:

What is your secret to building rapport quickly and maintaining it over time with your clients and people?

The idea is to take their best ideas and write a book: Leaders on Rapport: Secrets to Creating Successful Connection. (My next goal is to have this published in the first quarter of 2021.)

Now I’m taking a closer look at what they said. Noticing the patterns, looking at the outliers, and overlaying neuroscience on top of this to make sense of it all.

I thought you might like a sneak peak at what are showing up as the current top three ideas they shared.

Why Rapport?

I believe rapport is the “gateway drug”: it is the thing that makes all other things possible. There’s only so much impact we can have on the world on our own — we need to cooperate with others to make more happen.

Rapport is the place where it all begins. It leads to connection, which leads to relationships, which leads to trust.

When this journey began, little did i know how timely research on rapport would be. Now most of us have to create and sustain it with people who aren’t in the same room with us. And young people getting out of school — and everyone who’s looking for a new position — have to do things online. How can we break down the third wall of the screen between us?

Stay tuned for more ideas as they appear on my path this year.