Cassandra Chase On How To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same Physical Space
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
There’s tons of team building opportunities that have developed to get to know your teammates without being physically present with each other. One technique I have found particularly effective is kind of a virtual show-and-tell where people share and talk about an item that means a lot to them. You can really learn a lot about people in those kinds of sharing spaces.
We are living in a new world in which offices are becoming obsolete. How can teams effectively communicate if they are never together? Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but they don’t replicate all the advantages of being together. What strategies, tools and techniques work to be a highly effective communicator, even if you are not in the same space?
In this interview series, we are interviewing business leaders who share the strategies, tools and techniques they use to effectively and efficiently communicate with their team who may be spread out across the world. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cassandra Chase.
Cassandra is a business owner and social entrepreneur committed to providing marginalized communities with opportunities and essential resources. For ten years, Cassandra has dedicated her career to public service leading massive grassroots efforts in education, health, wellness, and social reform.
Cassandra founded Chase Consulting Group (CCG), a boutique business consulting firm that provides strategic management, business development, and new media marketing services to small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and government entities. She also co-founded Read Lead, a nonprofit organization that provides literacy and leadership training.
Her foundational work has impacted over 2 million residents in Los Angeles County. In 2020, NIKE recognized and featured Cassandra as a changemaker in the Legacy Project among seven other black women transforming the landscape in Los Angeles.
In her spare time, Cassandra spreads accessible information on wellness, veganism, and yoga. As a thought leader, Cassandra continues to foster a culture of civic engagement in the community in which she lives and works.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Well, ultimately I would say what led me to this career path is a value of service. My Mom is a registered nurse and my Dad is a United Methodist Minister. From a young age, they taught me to lead and serve my community. Activism and community service very much became a way of life growing up. My sister and I were always in a space of listening, and also learning how to strategize. Those aspects of my upbringing are really what sort of brought me to where I am today.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I would say the most interesting part of my journey so far has been being a young leader. For my nonprofit we also hired a lot of young people, and being their leader I had to quickly learn different ways to take in everyone’s perspective. So just as a general point, understanding what it means to be a leader amongst peers has been the most interesting part of starting my own company.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Decisions determine destiny.” This is important to me because many times as a leader I get caught up in thinking about what to do. Each moment in life presents us with a decision we have to make. We have to be intentional about everything we do in every moment, because the next moment is not necessarily garaunteed for us.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My Mom. While she worked for over 40 years as a nurse she was still an entrepreneur. She had her real estate license and taught me the importance of investment properties and owning multiple streams of income. She taught me about balance, doing what you love while also having a staple that can support your family. My mother understood the importance of voting, making sure you have a voice. She was the only one who could vote in my house growing up so she took that responsibility very seriously. We would have family meetings about what was on the ballot because she knew her vote represented the entire family. I have memories of walking into the voting booth with her as a small child because she always wanted to make sure her family was included in the entire process. She was a role model for me, a true leader.
Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave. One of them, of course, is how we work and how we communicate in our work. Many teams have started working remotely. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunity but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a team physically together?
I think the biggest benefit of having a team physically together is the ability to feel each other’s energy, sensing when people are into an idea and when they aren’t. The tool of body language is massive, a lot of the communication we have with one another is done without words.
On the flip side, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main challenges that arise when a team is not in the same space?
– Easy to misunderstand, and interpret these things in ways that may have been unintended.
– Have to make assumptions about how something is sharing a thing or saying something.
– Lose personal touch of being in front of a person.
I think it’s easy to misunderstand or interpret things in ways that may have been unintended. When we are communicating through technology we are missing the inflection of someone’s and we are missing their tonality. This forces us to make our own assumptions about how someone is sharing or saying something. That’s a very big challenge, because assumptions can often lead to misundertsandings.
Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? What are your “5 Things You Need To Know To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same Physical Space ? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- To be clear on objectives and goals. (To be able to have a foundation of what you are building off of.)
- Listen. (The space of online communication can be very easy for one person to dominate a conversation.)
- Use tools to help support communication and understand how eachother best communicates. (Try to understand how some people best communicate, whether that be text, email, or an app like slack.)
Has your company experienced communication challenges with your workforce working from home during the pandemic? For example, does your company allow employees to use their own cell phones or do they use the company’s phone lines for work? Can you share any other issues that came up?
Everyone uses their own technology, and the biggest obstacle which comes with that is connectivity issues. For my non-profit, when schools switched to online learning because of the pandemic, many kids went back to their homes without a proper internet connection. As a society, we have made the assumption that everyone has access to things like the internet. That is not the case, especially in underserved communities. There are so many times when we are conducting a class for students that the internet simply just goes out. We have to address problems like this nationally in order to give everyone access to the internet as we continue to move through the pandemic.
Let’s zoom in a bit. Many tools have been developed to help teams coordinate and communicate with each other. In your personal experiences which tools have been most effective in helping to replicate the benefits of being together in the same space?
The tools I use the most often are Zoom and Google Meet. I have also found Slack to be a huge help because it decongests my email inbox.
If you could design the perfect communication feature or system to help your business, what would it be?
Something that combines scheduling, meeting rooms, and face to face video chat. A one stop place for all of those things.
My particular expertise and interest is in Unified Communications. Has the pandemic changed the need or appeal for unified communications technology requirements? Can you explain?
There is more of a need for this type of communication to happen. The appeal has definitely grown as you see new channels of communication emerge just out of necessity for business during the pandemic.
The technology is rapidly evolving and new tools like VR, AR, and Mixed Reality are being developed to help bring remote teams together in a shared virtual space. Is there any technology coming down the pipeline that excites you?
None that I am familiar with. Honestly, some of the newer technology can be a little weird for me. I am not particularly interested in any one thing that might be on the horizon, but I am definitely open to experimenting with new platforms.
Is there a part of this future vision that concerns you? Can you explain?
Yeah, I think it just takes us further away from getting back in person with each other. I’m worried that we are continuing to innovate new ways to be apart, but together, instead of just being together.
So far we have discussed communication within a team. How has the pandemic changed the way you interact and engage your customers? How much of your interactions have moved to digital such as chatbots, messaging apps, phone, or video calls?
All of my communications have moved to digital. We have had to transition our traditional classes for the nonprofit online. I really want to get back in person for the students, I think physically being present together in a classroom is a huge piece of learning.
In my experience, one of the trickiest parts of working with a remote team is giving honest feedback, in a way that doesn’t come across as too harsh. If someone is in front of you much of the nuance can be picked up in facial expressions and body language. But not when someone is remote. Can you give a few suggestions about how to best give constructive criticism to a remote team member?
I think a prerequisite for giving someone constructive criticism is having a good standing relationship with them. Without that, criticism has a greater potential to come across as harsh. I think the goal we should have when giving another person criticism is to be as clear and supportive as possible.
Can you give any specific ideas about how to create a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion when you are not physically together?
Team building games and opportunities, leadership programs… sharing an object that is very important to you. Anything to kind of get a glance at someone in life.
There’s tons of team building opportunities that have developed to get to know your teammates without being physically present with each other. One technique I have found particularly effective is kind of a virtual show-and-tell where people share and talk about an item that means a lot to them. You can really learn a lot about people in those kinds of sharing spaces.
Ok wonderful. We are nearly done. Here is our last “meaty” question. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think it would be two-fold. The first part being centered around education, I would want to provide the highest quality of education to learners of all ages. I believe education is the foundation of success, so providing that to people who are in the need of it most would allow us to see a better world through that process. The other thing that I think would help us change the world would be a greater sense of awareness. People becoming more aware of who they are and calling into their lives what they wish to see. By doing this, we will be able to transform the world between our thoughts and actions. In order to accomplish any of this we have to be well ourselves, and take care of who we are.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
– Follow me on insta @mscchase
– My nonprofit @readlead1
– My consulting group: chasegroup.co
Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.
Cassandra Chase On How To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.