Chief executives, let's think about connections to work.

This month, I was a participant in a discussion on Quiet the Quiet at the World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos. It is a fast-changing world for workers It is clear that as the leaders engage in a lot relevant questions, including the pros and cons of working remotely The risks and potential presented by AI and the necessity to build better and more sustainable companies.

But one question is worthy of greater attention: If our workforce is changing and technology is evolving, and post-pandemic behaviors as well as expectations changing...don't us as leaders need to evolve too?

There's a whole generation of digital natives who are entering the work force. They have grown up making and sharing videos , not making calls or texts, and consider TikTok or YouTube their primary source for information. Personally, they are hyper-connected and equally hyper-engaged.

But in their workplaces there's a completely different picture. We're witnessing substantial declines in engagement and employee satisfaction in employees who work remotely Gen Z and younger millennials. Fewer than four in ten youngsters who work remotely or in hybrid settings know clearly what is required of them in the workplace as well as more than half of Gen Z employees are ambivalent or unengaged at work. When we consider the level of engagement among employees as the leading indicator for workforce productivity, this has major impact on every business and every financial performance.

What is causing this disconnect? As in work and in life, we all want to belong to some bigger picture than we are. There is a deep desire to belong, to feel a sense of community that is open, honest and real. However, the more our population becomes digitally distributed and AI-enabled and ad-hoc, the harder it is to feel a genuine connections every single day. Particularly if we've not redesigned our methods of working to accommodate the next generation. It is still common for us to ask employees to understand a plethora of documents and write long emails as well as attend inefficient meetings. They learn about layoffs and company priorities through comms which are so automated and scripted that they could be generated by ChatGPT. The only information we as executives have is through surveys of engagement that are cookie-cutter or live events with very low turn-in percentages, as well as sometimes snarky chats or Q&A.

The traditional managerial model is failing us. It's time to adapt how our leaders present themselves and connect with our employees. In the same way that we're focused on reskilling our workforce with regard to changes in population size, demographics as well as technological trends and trends, we should also upgrade our skills as leaders in order to establish trust and build connections at scale.

I've played around with a lot of this during the past several years . These are the things I'm learning and embracing, that I believe can assist us in presenting differently and be more effective in our leadership:

 1. Be real, be you.

When the epidemic, I participated in a global town hall from my parents' house at Flint, Michigan -- tired and slumbering in my velvet pajamas with my son, who is a toddler, and my grandmother shuffled between the background.

Perhaps it was my most effective communication ever.

Why? Because it was unscripted as well as messy, vulnerable and awkward. We tend to gravitate to "us versus us versus them" interactions when we work within a business, particularly during times of stress and challenges. It's easy to think of "leadership" as an unnamed, faceless machine. Making sure that you are video-first with your communications can be a potent deterrent. It forces you to remove the veil and protect yourself from writing and editing comms. The most effective way to make it clear is to show up just as you really are.

By the way, there is a lot of instances of leaders being vulnerable and it backfiring...but I suspect in most instances it was because it was too performative. You have to be willing for that raw version of yourself to fail before your colleagues. We all have flaws that makes us humans. And we all want to see our leaders to be courageous. It makes us want to be more like them.

 2. Beginning with the "why ."

Much like many managers I've had to take difficult decisions in the last year. In the past, I've made executive decisions and laidoffs to restructuring and closing down projects to improve efficiency. It's my responsibility to make the hard, unpopular calls and enact swiftly across the company.

In a growing number of cases, employees are craving transparency behind these choices - not only the "what" however, but the "why". The desire is to comprehend the larger competition or market context as well as the way in which trade-offs are considered and balanced, as well as the details of who was involved and at what time.

The old communications playbook would say that when there is a piece of critical communication and limited attention, you start by asking the "what" then get straight to the essential steps. But I have been far better at getting my team to embrace a difficult decision when I approach my staff as important stakeholders who deserve to understand the context.

As a result, starting with "why" is a first rule for any communication . Of course there are always restrictions to fully being transparent (legal and PR, as well as governance, customer risk) However, I've discovered that most of the time that the obstacles can be described as. Perceived. People will not always agree with your choices, but it is possible to argue that, if they don't they are not performing your job. But they will accept and respect your decisions when you start with the reason behind it.

 3. Spend money on in-person meetings to get to know each other better.

Yes, I recognize the irony of the chief executive of a company that produces videos saying this. But one of my biggest lessons over the last few months was that we had were too slow and not deliberate enough in connecting our teams together on a daily basis.

In January, a week after announcing layoffs, we organized a corporate kickoff event in NYC. We flew in employees from over 12 nations. There were employees from Ukraine who traveled by train or planes to get there. We eschew the usual event party confetti, and went with an unpretentious atmosphere and a low-cost budget. This was among the most energizing and needed investments I've done.

It is even more powerful for leaders when you take a flight and meet your team where they are. We have an entirely distributed executive team spread across eight different locations from Seattle to Switzerland. The majority of them were recruited in the past year, so we they are relatively new and just beginning to become a cohesive team. To help accelerate this gelling the team, we began hosting offsites at the homes of each leader's city. Our CFO's mother gathered us at her fireplace in Vermont. Our Head of Sales wore his apron and made us frittatas for breakfast. Our working sessions were held in the Head of Product's dining table.

The pandemic gave us an unintentional glimpse into people's home and life. If we take advantage of that and incorporate it into our day-to-day it is possible to build stronger, more connected and higher-performing teams.

 4. You can go through "lean back" to "lean forward" encounters.

One of the most important skills in communication is the capability to develop "lean forward" experiences instead of "lean back" broadcasts. Human attention spans are becoming shorter (now lower than eight seconds which is less than the length of a goldfish!). But we continue to communicate by one-to-many communications, either by email, which you can read or an extremely produced town hall where you relax and observe.

At we see this tax on engagement surfacing within our own records in which the time it takes to stop watching a video has decreased over the past few years. If we do not change the way we approach it, tuning out is going to seriously hamper our capability to keep our teams in sync and productive.

The key here is shifting our thinking and willingness to try new things. The new generation is that is entering the workforce and have a head start on us with their capacity to develop and capture rich and authentic information. They are ahead because they're free from the constraints our generation experienced over the years in conventional working environments.

The truth is that employees don't quit jobs. They quit managers. In reality, CEOs are the ultimate managers, and in an study of more than 113,000 executives, the number one key to effective leadership is trust. We as leaders must show us how to conduct ourselves in more authentic, interesting and reliable ways. I'm betting that leaders who accept this exciting modern world will be more successful in overseeing the next generation of workers. They will better inform and motivate teams that are distributed and align them to better outcomes and develop solid relationships that result in extraordinary work. They'll stop communicating but instead communicate more effectively.