EP 129: Beyond the List: Building Communities of Generosity and Mutual Care with Charles Vogl

We often hear the advice, “You just need to find your community.”

It sounds simple. Hopeful, even. But it can ring hollow for anyone who has tried to do it, and for those in leadership roles where they carry the additional burdens of responsibility and visibility. And it’s especially fraught advice for anyone who has experienced relational trauma.

Because true community isn’t something you stumble into. It has to be built, slowly and intentionally. And it’s often uncomfortable and messy when we’re healing from experiences where reaching for connection resulted in hurt and betrayal.

But human beings are wired for connection. We long for it. And we’re more disconnected from each other than ever.

The remedy for our loneliness is in the slow, awkward, sacred work of showing up and staying, even through discomfort and disagreement. If we lay foundations of shared dignity and respect, we can build courageously honest relationships and community in those uncomfortable spaces.

My guest today joins me to explore the intricate journey of building a true community, one that transcends buzzwords and embraces the courage to be vulnerable and honest, to disagree, repair, and stay genuinely connected.

Charles Vogl is an adviser, speaker, and the author of three books, including the international bestseller The Art of Community.

His work is used to advise and develop leadership and programs worldwide within organizations including Google, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twitch, Amazon, ServiceNow, Meetup.com, Wayfair and the US Army.

Charles holds an M.Div. from Yale, where he studied spiritual traditions, ethics, and business as a Jesse Ball duPont Foundation scholar.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

How a seemingly simple ritual of Friday dinners turned Charles’s house into a community hub
Why investing in community building will always require some amount of intention and effort
How Charles’s experiences working for social change shaped his skill for bringing people together around shared purpose and values
The difference between true community and what Charles calls “mirage communities”
What holds leaders back from creating spaces where real relationships and community can be built
The importance of “campfire experiences” for developing trust and admiration
Why we need to invite others in, not just announce our plans and hope they show up

Learn more about Charles Vogl:

Learn more about Rebecca:

Resources:

Transcript:

Rebecca Ching: All right, y’all. Welcome back to another episode of The Unburdened Leader. We’ve got a little housekeeping for you before we dive into the show. If you are not already subscribed to the show, please subscribe, and if you have listened to a show, I’d be honored if you left a rating and a review and shared this episode, and this show in general, with folks you think may benefit from it. This makes a difference. This really helps get the word out of the show to more people, so thank you for doing it, and I’m gonna be formally launching my Substack soon under my name Rebecca Ching. It’s called Unburdened Leader – keeping it all consistent. But we’re gonna be having deeper conversations around these episodes along with, more real time, touching base on issues that intersect between leadership, mental health, and relationships. So I’d love to see you over there! Okay, now on with the show!

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Charles Vogl: The type of community that I’m encouraging people in leadership roles to grow for themselves and for the people who are looking to them are efforts that when people do participate they become more healthy, adaptive, resilient, and they contribute more, and they receive contribution. I want to be crystal clear; that’s the opposite of organizations and people who want to bring people together to get attention, time, and money. And there are a lot of people in this world who say they’re building community, selling subscriptions, just offering free content alongside advertisements, and they say they’re bringing people together to connect and what they want is your time, attention, and your money. And if you don’t give them that, you’re worth nothing to them. That’s probably not how you feel about those five people you would call on a bad day.

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Rebecca Ching: In a world where “finding your community” is often touted as a simple solution. Many leaders find themselves navigating a complex path marked by loneliness and the challenge of authentic connection.

2:08

In this episode I’ll share with you the intricate journey of building a true community, one that transcends buzzwords and embraces the courage to be vulnerable, honest, disagree and repair, and stay genuinely connected.

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans navigating life’s challenges and leading in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry and how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

Hey, y’all, you know, I have my little script teed up, my outline that I wrote for you all, and I’ll get to that. As we’re talking about community and community building, it feels weird to not take a pause as I’m recording this in spring of 2025. Whenever you may listen to this, I just want to make a note that business as usual feels weird, and when thinking about community, how this word is mentioned, sometimes offhandedly but is detached from real connection with people, that we may not be part of our inner circle or our campfire group, as my guest today talks about, but community is citizens of our country and of our world.

Yeah, this isn’t business as usual, and this is a time, as we think about community, to think of it outside of ourselves, to navigate the people and the practices that help us build courage so we don’t go through the motions and can have generative spaces.

4:16

We’re in a pickle right now, and a pickle feels too light. It’s a shit show right now, and I practice a lot of hope, and I believe in the best of us, and as you listen to this episode today, I also want to challenge you on your connections to those that you may not know, those who are fighting for a community that allows them just to have some basic dignity, some freedom to exist as they are safely. I know you care. I know everyone that listens to this show, you care, you’re invested deeply in your community, in those that you support, and caring can be exhausting, but let’s make sure that we do the reps with our support team so that we cannot forget those that may feel really disengaged and really scared right now as we’re navigating being human in this world.

So, all right, my little off-script phrase of, “No, this is not business as usual,” and I want to continue to offer you conversations that make you think and challenge you and support you, but I also don’t want to bypass or be dismissive or not acknowledge that we’re at a time in history right now, which feels weird being a part of something that is profound and big, and just knowing that when we pull together as a large collective community and move out of comfort, we can be a part of making history for the better.

6:19

So, all right, back to my regular programming.

—–

Rebecca Ching: All right, we often hear the phrase, “You just need to find your community,” right? It sounds simple, hopeful even, right? It can also feel hollow. For those who’ve tried, especially those in leadership roles carrying the burden of responsibility and visibility, and especially those with any kind of relational trauma in their story. Community, in its truest form, isn’t something you stumble into. It’s something you build intentionally, slowly, and often uncomfortably. It’s showing up even when it’s inconvenient for you. It’s disagreeing without walking away or cutting off the person you’re in conflict with. When it’s safe, when there’s some basic fundamental dignity there in the relationship, community doesn’t happen to us by accident. It’s cultivated over time through our consistent presence, shared values, mutual trust, and also just to bond as citizens, as community members, as a part of an organization. The path to meaningful connection is rarely linear, no matter the three-step plans that some people may tout, it’s often messy, especially when you’re healing from experiences where connection hurt and betrayed us, right?

And in the year of the Lord 2025, when trust feels like a scarce resource and many of us are still holding grief and disorientation from the past several years and then some, building and maintaining a sense of community can feel downright terrifying and exhausting. For those carrying relational trauma, neglect, betrayal, abandonment, community doesn’t feel like a luxury. It can feel like a threat. The tension we hold within our inner systems of being seen and known is often laced with the fear that it won’t end well. And yet, we still long for it. That longing doesn’t go away.

8:33

Many of you might have heard or read Dr. Vivek Murthy, he’s the former US Surgeon General, and he named loneliness one of the most profound public health crises of our time. The ache for connection is wired into us, but the solution isn’t more social media or endless Zoom calls, right, or another dang meeting with — what do you call those again — team-building exercises, right? Like, no way. The remedy lies in that slow, awkward sacred work of showing up and staying connected within yourself and with others. And building relationships that stretch over time, not just events, it’s the courage to trust again, even if just a little.

I love Brené Brown’s lens and research on fitting in and belonging. You know, fitting in is a performance. Belonging is a presence, as you are, and you still feel welcome and enough. Fitting in says, “I’ll be who you want to be,” and y’all, I know, me included. We all have PhDs in being who others want us to be. Whether it’s conscious or not, we can shapeshift, right? But belonging says, “I’m gonna risk being who I am, and I’m gonna have that pay off by being received and welcomed,” right? That kind of risk is especially high for those who’ve been punished or exiled for being too much, too loud, too bold, and oh, gosh, I mean, today to not fit a certain demographic.

10:08

Without a deep sense of internal belonging, knowing our worth regardless of feedback, it’s nearly impossible not to default to hustling or approval. Leadership built on hustling will never create the healing communities we need, and healing is not to be therapy but sometimes just being around good people who treat you well has a way of healing, right? Doing work together, showing respect (I know you know this, but it bears repeating), community doesn’t happen though declarations or hashtags. It happens through repetition or, as I often say, doing the reps. We build trust in small moments, consistent presence, shared rituals, and mutual care. And mutual care is something that we really need to step up and pursue more these days because, sheesh, rugged individualism sure took a beating on the needed depths of community.

And The Washington Post just recently reported on some data from the Census Household Poll Survey. They note that people who experienced extreme loneliness lived in states with higher poverty rates, noting that loneliness did not correlate with time spent alone, but instead connected to more of a lack of social, economic, and community strength. Noteworthy. Imagine that.

So whether it’s regularly checking in with someone, inviting disagreement without defensiveness, simply following through on a promise, these are the bricks of real connection and trust. Yes, they’re often boring, inconvenient, and invisible to the outside world, but over time, these actions build something strong enough to hold us. A generative and healthy community also demands we build our capacity for rupture and repair. When conflict leads to cancellation, cutoffs (we call them emotional cutoffs in the Family Systems world), we often lose the ability to stay in conversation when things get uncomfortable, I mean, and even offensive at times, right?

12:23

We don’t have to take it. There are lines to this, I want to emphasize. But we build courageously honest relationships in uncomfortable spaces, and again, the spectrum of discomfort to harm — there’s a spectrum. I’m not talking about harmful ones, the ones we disagree and stay anyways, as long as there are fundamental foundations for dignity and respect, the ones where we hear feedback and don’t collapse. And this is the work of community, and it’s showing up kind of like the things that my guest today did with washing dishes and bringing a meal and coordinating sponsorships for a community meal. It’s not for the feign of heart but for those who want to lead with depth and wholeness.

We see glimmers of this kind of community that remind us that authentic community isn’t shiny. It’s earned. It’s hard won. It’s random sometimes. It’s awkward and complicated. And in 2025, it’s more vital than ever. This leads me to my guest today who developed his life’s work around helping us build sustaining and meaningful communities. Charles Vogl advises and develops leadership programs worldwide with organizations including Google and Airbnb and LinkedIn and Twitch, Amazon, and The US Army. He’s instructed and presented at organizations including the Yale Leadership Institute, Harvard Law School, The Stanford Graduate School of Business. And his book, which has a new version coming out, at least in the spring of 2025, there’s a lot of new content in it. Check it out. I love it. It’s gotten me through the last handful of years, keeping me focused on what matters.

14:13

But in his book, The Art of Community, he shares how both community and belonging can be built through time-tested principles and rituals. It even won a Nautilus Book Award for Business and Leadership Writing, and he also wrote a book called Building Brand Communities, and that speaks to organizational leaders connecting the people important for success, and that also won a really cool award.

In his twenties though, Charles has this really cool foundation where he served in the Peace Corps in Northern Zambia, and there he witnessed inspirational community inside his rural village, and after The Peace Corps, Charles founded a social impact award-winning documentary film company in New York City. So he’s done a lot of cool things and experienced a lot on the frontlines, and I’m so excited for you to hear our conversation. I feel like it’s timely and also timeless. So now let’s get to it!

—–

Rebecca Ching: Charles Vogl, welcome to The Unburdened Leader podcast! Thank you so much for joining me for what I think is a very timely and needed conversation. So glad you’re here!

Charles Vogl: Well, thank you for inviting me!

Rebecca Ching: Now, I want to start off first, you wrote about a story or an experience, I should say, when you were studying at Yale. You started to host dinners to foster community during your graduate studies, and that just landed with me because I feel like I did some of the similar things too, and I had some fond memories. But you got some interesting data from it because those gatherings didn’t come easily. And I’m curious for you to share what motivated you to keep going despite some of the initial challenges that you experienced.

16:00

Charles Vogl: So I got to graduate school, and before I showed up, my now wife and I had spent several years as PBS filmmakers literally flying around the world and talking to people who had experienced genocide and had been part of really horrific acts, fundraising and all that kind of stuff. And I showed up on campus to study religion and philosophy and ethics, other things as well but primarily that. Said differently, I was in a totally different universe and all of a sudden around people who had experiences that were so radically different from mine because I had been a filmmaker for years flying around. And also it’s no surprise to anybody that the long history of Yale and the celebration of the brand was so great that I was convinced that even though I’d been admitted, and I was expected to study there that I would never actually belong there, that it was built for other people and that I was visiting, in so many words.

I subsequently found out that was ridiculous, but that was my experience when I got there. And it was a struggle then of how to connect with people who had such different backgrounds and, in many cases, different interests as well because I, at the time, didn’t have any interest in ordained spiritual ministry, and a lot of the people I was studying next to did have that aspiration. I also didn’t expect to go off and be a professor somewhere. Obviously, I was sitting next to people who thought that was their future.

And I remembered some wisdom that had been shared with me by a mentor of mine that all real friendships, the kind of relationships we develop where we ask for help, happen in intimate conversations, which is to say not at welcome parties, not at barbecues on a lawn, not at symposiums. They happened around a table or on a couch or while standing around with coffee. And so, if we want friendships, if we want those relationships that we can call on for help when we need them, then we need to make time to sit down around that table or have that coffee or you get the idea.

18:02

And on Friday evenings, I knew I was gonna have dinner somewhere, so we took this seriously, and my now wife and I decided that we would just make food and invite people who were strangers to us, because we were new, to share dinner with us in our small home if they wanted to. And we were so without money at this chapter in our lives that the first stop on this grand adventure was to go to the Goodwill there in Connecticut to buy enough plates so that we physically had plates — [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Oh wow.

Charles Vogl: — so that we could invite people over, and that’s where we started. And in the beginning (I think the first two Fridays) it was really exciting. People came over because they wanted to meet people and it was a new campus and whatnot, and that was kind of fun. And then we were no longer novel, and there was an entire university with 15,000 people on it doing interesting things, and we were no longer new, and so, it became clear that it looked like a really bad idea.

I remember sometimes I would make a lot of food and then one or two people would show up. My wife reminded me that sometimes nobody showed up. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Oh, wow.

Charles Vogl: And let me tell you, when there are 15,000 people on campus and nobody shows up for a dinner I made, it’s dispiriting. But we continued because we had this really ministerial sense that this was important, not only for us but for the people who did show up. And sure enough, in a lifestyle that was full of challenging my brain at levels I didn’t know people were gonna ask me to go and the culture shock of also entering academia after so many years away, and quite frankly, the Connecticut winter, sitting down at a table for no less than three hours (like six o’clock to nine o’clock) with hot food was the best part of the week. And, of course, what I learned was it doesn’t matter what percentage of 15,000 people on campus showed up. If two people show up and they like having that hot food and you spin a conversation that is enriching to you, then that is the best evening.

20:05

So we continued to do that no matter. It didn’t seem very popular except this really weird thing happened, and that is over two years they became so popular that I calculated we had hosted over 500 people in our home —

Rebecca Ching: Oh, wow.

Charles Vogl: — one small gathering at a time. And we could no longer keep up with the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning, which was obviously done in community. And so, we had to figure out how to continue, and we invited the people who had been regulars to our home one Friday nights and said, “How are we gonna do this?” And what came out of that was some of them volunteered to be dinner leaders, so they’d make sure on an even Friday night somebody was gonna lead that that wasn’t me. And then others volunteered to help them so they wouldn’t do it by themselves.

And then my friend Arjahn handled the waitlists that we were generating, because at that point, more people wanted to have dinner in our home with us than we physically had seats at our table. And then I remember our friend Sam handled the sponsorships.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh.

Charles Vogl: Because it turns out not all the undergrads could afford the groceries to make a dinner for 14 people, many of whom they didn’t know, just to spend the evening with, and others were happy to pay for that.

So it turned into this really rich, we-didn’t-plan-it program of often strangers and sometimes friends who’d made friends from other departments at our table spending no less than three hours talking late into a cold Connecticut night.

Rebecca Ching: At what point did these dinners kind of catch on? Because you said it was over a two-year period, and you were just doing it. You were putting in the reps with this ritual almost. At what point did it catch onto the point where it was more than a few people showing up?

Charles Vogl: It’s hard for me to say. Also I’m not clear what you mean by catch on. If I interpret that to mean at what point did people expect that Soch and I would host a meal, and if you wanted to join us and you told us ahead of time so that there was space, you could join us, months maybe.

22:10

But as far as catch on in the sense that it became easy, it was always work because there was intentionality and preparation and planning and communication and then eventually coordination. And the reason I’m responding to your prompt that way is I talk to a lot of people who want it to eventually get easy, right? Like it’s just a turnkey thing. And, well, the word got out that this was a really wonderful time to spend with no evaluation, a quiet space, and it was always a gift. That was very, very important that the meal was a gift. But it never caught on kind of like it was super easy, if that’s what you meant.

Rebecca Ching: No, it wasn’t, but I think it’s a really good notation. To me, it was more of where the word got out and there was more demand is probably a better way for me to ask, where there was more of a demand for those seats where a waitlist was needed was really my intention. But I appreciate you bringing up that point because there is this, “When is it just gonna flow and not feel like labor?” And I’m curious for you to say more when people ask you about that expectation for it to shift from the labor to not feeling like labor when you’ve put together a gathering. What are some of the things that you’re hearing from people when they ask you that question around ease?

Charles Vogl: The analogy I have is there seems to be this zeitgeist of aspiration that they want it to be like losing weight, that they want to get really serious about it for four to six weeks and that should be easy, right? And just as in keeping our bodies healthy, keeping our social lives healthy, it always needs investment and attention, and the question is how much and how good are we at that? It was fun to know that friends were gonna come and friends I didn’t yet know were gonna join us, and to know that it was gonna be a special, the term I use is sacred time.

24:13

It was sacred because it was set aside. There was no evaluation. There was no competition. There was no commerce. Certainly in academic life, and this is also true in professional life, we often meet people who are doing the things that we do or adjacent to what we do because that’s just near us.

Rebecca Ching: Right.

Charles Vogl: To go to a space where I’m gonna sit next to a physicist or a medical ethicist or a human rights journalist or a world-renowned historian in parts of American history that I didn’t know existed is thrilling when I find out they want to sit next to me for three hours and just find out what we’re gonna talk about. And to look forward to that makes the preparation easier, and I also had to learn how we needed to prepare enough so that it was elegant and fun and comfortable (right, no one wants to sit around my dirty laundry) and yet simple enough that we could maintain the investment and that others recognized it was an authentic, casual enough space that they could just be in it comfortably. And I’ve known now that I’m older that that dial is gonna look different for different subcultures, right? Twenty-five-year-old grad students are gonna relate to that differently than fifty-year-old lawyers, and we get to play with that. And if we make it too formal and too involved, we don’t want to do it, and then maybe people will think, “Well, gee, this is so pretentious.” And if we make it too casual or too sloppy, then some people are gonna show up and say, “Wow, it’d be great if you prepared for having guests over because I want to spend several hours here.”

Rebecca Ching: It sounds like the intention and the effort never lessened.

26:00

Charles Vogl: Oh, absolutely not. The intention actually grew when we understood how powerful that time was and how life-changing, without any exaggeration, those relationships proved to be. And I’ll give you one example.

It turned out about half of our guests were undergrads, and that really surprised me because at the time I was in my mid-thirties, and my peers were thirties and up. And so, to have these 18-to-20-year-olds showing up was kind of surprising. “Why would they want to have dinner with a bunch of 30-somethings studying, in our case, religion?” And also just the way the campus geography was, it took them half an hour each way, either walking in the Connecticut winter or waiting for a shuttle, to get to our home. And every one of these undergrads had, if I remember correctly, 13 dining halls already prepaid with organic salad bars, and in some cases, stone-fired pizza already waiting for them on a Friday night.

Years later, I saw some research that showed that young people — and I think that was defining as 18-to-24 at the time. The number of people that young people have who are adults in their lives with whom they can talk about important subjects, which I think was code for sex, money, and career, is between zero and two. And when I read that, I remember getting chills because I realized that for those years that we were hosting, Soch and I were 100% of the adults some of those undergrads had in their lives without an evaluative relationship, that they had venue and comfort to talk about important subjects in their lives, and I was totally unaware of the importance that those conversations may had been playing to those young people in that chapter of their lives.

Rebecca Ching: Mm, I don’t know if that’s shifted much today either. I’m curious if you could take me back to the moment you realized helping people build communities of belonging would become your life’s work.

28:06

Charles Vogl: I don’t even know when that was because I was surprised that it turned out I had spent decades building this skill that there was a hunger for.

Rebecca Ching: Huh.

Charles Vogl: You know, what we haven’t talked about is before I went to graduate school, I’d spent much of my life doing things that somebody might broadly call activism. I would say I was working towards social change in a good way. So I was a volunteer in a radical, spiritually-motivated homeless shelter in California right out of college. I served in The US Peace Corps where I worked on human rights abuses and the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. I went on to become a PBS filmmaker where I told stories about healing from genocide and the need for education reform, right? The throughline is I could never depend on transactional relationships to work with those challenges.

Rebecca Ching: Mm, dang.

Charles Vogl: I had to learn, with the help of many mentors, to bring people together around shared values and purpose, and by virtue of doing that, then we could accomplish things that were impossible with the resources we had if you just took a transactional so-called management approach to the challenges.

So I went to grad school, and because I’d had some success before grad school I was invited to guest lecture a number of departments, amongst them the business school. And I remember being shocked at what they called leadership development because I’d just come from this international world of romping around the world working on really mortally-dangerous challenges. And all of the stuff they were talking about never applied to the stuff I was doing because you don’t get to tell me what to do and then you tell them you’re the boss and then leave because you’re still in the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa trying to save the lives of children in the AIDS epidemic, right? What came about there was when they had learned I had been a filmmaker and I would do storytelling, and for those of who involved in fundraising, you have to be a good storyteller because if you can’t tell a story and you’re not interesting and you can’t generate emotional resonance, go home. And so, it turned out there was a hunger for me to teach that, and so, I did.

When I was in grad school, I also had the pleasure of learning about ancient spiritual traditions that had been around for more than a thousand years, and I remember being inspired that I could leave that classroom in that minute and find people who were still gathering in those traditions, doing those rituals, upholding those values today, that that’s how strong they’re holding together.

30:33

So I got out of grad school. I didn’t want to be a PBS filmmaker anymore, a life I couldn’t go back to. I certainly didn’t want to go into ordained ministry. I had a degree in religion. I didn’t know what I was going to do, and our economy didn’t help. So I just started meeting people who might have a thought of what I could do, and one of those people is a guy named Kevin Lin.

At the time Kevin Lin had just recently founded the company called Twitch. And for those who don’t know what Twitch is, it’s an online platform where people gather largely around video game enthusiasms, and last I heard they had a quarter billion members. At the time, they didn’t have a quarter billion members, they had tens of millions but not a quarter billion. And Kevin told me that he knew they would grow but what he wanted to get better at is connecting the people who were showing up. And when he said that over lunch, not for me to solve it, not because he thought I was the guy to ask, but just because he said it out loud and it was one of the challenges he was handling, my head almost exploded with all these things I wanted to share with him because he was creating a platform and bringing people together, and he was skilled in building a billion-dollar tech company, not skilled in bringing people together around shared values and purpose.

So I went home to write what I thought was gonna be a ten-page white paper, share it with Kevin, share it with anybody else, keep going with my life. It turns out I had more to say. It turns out it was book-length, and it turns out the first publisher that saw it wanted to release it, and here we are.

Rebecca Ching: Thank you for sharing that! Well, first, I have a couple things.

32:01

My brain’s exploding with a few things that you said. What is the difference between a transactional relationship, and I don’t even know if you put a name on the other kind of —

Charles Vogl: We say relational just to give it a contrast.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, so transactional and relational, because you said you realized you could not count on people just because you booked them. It really had to be guided by something more like shared values, mission, and purpose. Is there anything else that you think is noteworthy on the difference between a transactional and a relational relationship?

Charles Vogl: So in the simplest terms, in a transactional relationship or we’ll say, for clarity, in a pure transactional relationship, you and I are both calculating explicitly or maybe implicitly what I’m getting out of this and is the cost low enough that I’m getting more than I’m putting in by what I value, and I might value my time and my money or my network or my access differently than you, but I’m calculating it. And as soon as you’re no longer giving me a relationship where that calculation is in favor of being connected to you, my opportunity cost is so high it goes for something else.

In a relational (what I’m calling relational just to distinguish the two), there may be some transaction, and if you are an energy drain for me then I can’t handle you anymore, then at some point I’m just not scheduling time with you. But if it turns out your house burned down, and you need a dry, warm place to sleep right now until you can call the insurance company, then I don’t calculate what I’m gonna get because I said, “Well, I have a warm couch.”

And so, what I write in the book is generosity is requisite, and generosity means I’m willing to commit, wondering if or knowing that I’m not getting a positive ROI on this. And you know that my formal education is in religion, I would take that to a spiritual level. Why would I give you a dry place to sleep when you want one expecting no transaction, maybe knowing I won’t get one because you’re gonna leave the country.

34:12

Why would I do that unless there’s something about your existential value that I see and appreciate and want to commit to? And so, it’s really a reflection of spiritual growth or spiritual awareness, whether I call it that or not.

Rebecca Ching: What you said is also a reflection of character, integrity, and values? Or not?

Charles Vogl: We could articulate it that way. I mean, I think that if you’re gonna name that then you need to drill down what is the value, because the value isn’t Charles is building a network of debt so that when I need help I call it in because that would be transactional.

Rebecca Ching: Right.

Charles Vogl: Right, and that’s a value, right? I want a bunch of you to be indebted to me so that I can say, “Hey, you called me and used the couch. It’s time to pay up.”

Rebecca Ching: All right, so this is a great segue because so much of your work is focused on building community and “building community” is like a buzzword in leadership conversations. But your work, to me, takes it deeper than the buzzy community building, corporate jargon, or just personal and professional development jargon I run into because I see your work (and you touched on this already) helping leaders build a depth beyond the surface or boxes to check. And I want to get into what you call mirage communities. But you help people learn how to really connect with themselves and others that is often maybe avoided in workspaces that actually leads to sustained change by accessing these long-standing spiritual traditions with a reverence, and you do it without co-opting. a lot of times people can take these spiritual traditions and co-opt it. And then you teach generosity in a way that’s at odds, I think, with the individualism that’s really big here, at least in The States, taught to, “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to advance and work our way up the ladder.” It’s a generosity. It’s very different. So that’s why I’ve been so drawn to your work. There’s just layers to it but it’s systemic too and systematic.

36:16

Charles Vogl: Mm-hmm. So I define community very narrowly in my work, and I define it as a group of people who care about the mutual concern of one another. I don’t care if you live near each other. I don’t care if you’re dressed like each other. I don’t care if you go to the same concerts with each other (and maybe you do all those things) if I don’t see and you don’t feel the presence of mutual concern, then it’s something, it’s just not a community as I’m describing it. And usually it’s what we call a mirage community. A mirage community is something that someone often names a community, usually because they want to brag. But when we look carefully with a trained eye, we see there’s no community. And often what people are bragging about in their communities that are mirage communities are lists – lists of attendees, lists of customers, lists of donors, lists of subscribers. I’m gonna be crystal clear, those lists are fantastic. Compile them and use them. They’re also not communities.

I teach this in my workshops because I want you, and everyone listening, to be inoculated from being distracted by people who brag about building community at one concert or one festival or one retreat or one, one, one, one alumni event, and they don’t have a community. They have a list of attendees. So as soon as we inoculate ourselves from being distracted by people who are bragging that that’s what they’re doing and advocating how to do it that way, we free ourselves up to pay attention to, well, what are the investments we need to make with our time and our attention, the people we care about, to actually knit together relationships that contain generosity and mutual care?

Rebecca Ching: I mean, that does really blow up a majority of conversation about community.

Charles Vogl: Yeah, absolutely. The vast majority because those are commercially viable.

38:05

Rebecca Ching: You know, I’m wondering, though, because I’m a big fan of live music. What I’m experiencing is connection. I’m wondering —

Charles Vogl: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: But the people there help foster — there’s a shared experience that’s beautiful. I connect with the music and its place in my story.

Charles Vogl: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: I’ve been going to concerts that are dating me, of late. But I don’t know their names. There isn’t this sense of generosity. I mean, maybe I move aside so while we’re dancing we don’t bump into each other. But it isn’t relationship building.

Charles Vogl: Well, I mean, you said it all there. You don’t know their names.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Charles Vogl: So if you have a bad day, a house burns down or learn a family member has cancer, I know exactly how many of those people you’re gonna call. I know exactly. Now, I want to be crystal clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a music fan. There are subcultures I’m happy to be a part of. And I could build a community there.

Now, here’s what I’m also guessing about you after, I’m presuming, decades of being a music fan, is you have been to musical events where you had an experience that did lead to a friendship that turned into something to be terribly important in your life, am I right?

Rebecca Ching: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Charles Vogl: Fantastic. Let me know if I’m also right about this. The way that friendship developed was not by standing in a big room with hundreds or thousands of people facing forward, but in an intimate setting where you talked about something where you discovered, in the best way possible, that they understand you intellectually and emotionally more than the other people in your life.

Rebecca Ching: A hundred percent.

Charles Vogl: And that concert venue may have been a fantastic place for you to start that intimate experience. We call that a campfire experience in my work. But we need to note that if you didn’t get that campfire experience, standing with 5,000 people watching an artist that you love didn’t generate that friendship.

40:06

Rebecca Ching: So, okay, campfire experience is the catalyst, right? How does your approach — and I’m thinking of leaders right now. A lot of the leaders I work with are like, “What do I do to face all these challenges? I’ve got to meet diverse needs in my community, there is economic uncertainty, the social divisions are charged, technology is changing by the millisecond.” How does a campfire experience or how does your lens on community building help a leader lead well?

Charles Vogl: The first thing we do is respect the power of the campfire experience, which is exactly opposite what most people in organizations that want to brag about how great their events are want to create.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Charles Vogl: So I don’t know who the five people you would call if someone in your family gets a really bad diagnosis are. But here’s what I already know. The relationship that you have with those five people was forged over several intimate experiences where you felt private enough to have a possibly vulnerable conversation. Said differently, if you didn’t give venue to those vulnerable conversations, you wouldn’t have those five friends to call on that bad day. And that could be a professional bad day or a financial bad day or a legal bad day. My guess is that if I showed up with a photographer and a videographer to whatever those events were that forged those relationships, it would not be a very good photograph. And so, I found that many executives are afraid to create those events because they’re not good for bragging.

I’ve worked with a number of very famous tech companies that people can look up if they look me up, and I respect the fear, and it makes me cringe when I talk to executives who are afraid to create the intimate experience because what’s the photograph? What’s gonna go on the deck afterwards about how great this was? But we need to respect that’s how it happened.

41:59

I was recently contacted by a national nonprofit that distributed staff around the country, and they connect virtually, and it turns out that they had some conversations come up fueled by alcohol when they did gather, and now their lawyer’s involved.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Charles Vogl: And as I was talking to the executive who’s talking to me because the problem is that bad, what came up is throughout the year of this organization with people across the country, their staff don’t even have venue to have the intimate conversations to give them the possibility of generating relationships of trust and admiration, and if you don’t give your staff venue for the possibility of a campfire experience to generate trust and admiration, let us not act surprised that you brought them together, gave them alcohol, and now their lawyer’s involved. This is a six- or seven-digit problem because you didn’t respect the importance of campfire experiences so now lawyers are involved.

Rebecca Ching: I’m just thinking too, there are so many diverse needs and expectations right now. And I don’t use this word lightly but there’s an energy with some to an entitlement that maybe falls into the transactional space but also is real in wanting to be respected and honored, right? There’s a lot of charge —

Charles Vogl: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: — around relationships in general, let alone in a workplace. And so, what does a leader do, when they’re feeling lost or overwhelmed, to help bridge the divides while honoring their own values and maintaining their own personal boundaries, let alone the organization that they’re a part of, honoring those guardrails too.

Charles Vogl: All right, I’m feeling afraid to respond to that because the question was so general. “What does a leader do when they’re feeling,” because —

Rebecca Ching: Break it down!

44:01

Charles Vogl: — I’m afraid anything I respond would be so trite I would be actively called out as sharing a broadly-painted answer. What I can speak to is there is a tension right now of workers wanting to find connection at work, largely because that’s where friends are made, and we, as a country, are lonely outside of work. We’re lonely as a country, and that includes outside of work, so much so our last Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic. That’s not Charles saying that; that’s the Surgeon General based on research.

So you can imagine you have employees who, on balance, don’t have adequate connections outside of work. They want it in work, which the research shows is fantastic for both your organization and individuals at huge levels. Marissa King, who’s now out of Wharton, is one of my favorite researchers on that subject. Meanwhile, they’re doing that in a relationship that is explicitly transactional, and they want to make sure that they’re not on the yucky end of that transaction, which is to say they want to grab as much value as they can while they’re also looking for the empathy, the admiration, the trust, the understanding that they want in a relational — and that gets messy really quickly. And it gets even more messy when we understand that people connect in an online context much more slowly than they do in a live context. It takes a multiple of times. There’s some research that is trying to quantify that, but we need to know it takes much longer. And we also know that friendships take dozens of hours, so you hosting a 90-minute barbecue on a Sunday ain’t gonna do it, or you buying a happy hour from seven o’clock to ten o’clock, putting people in a room and fueling with alcohol ain’t gonna do it. And so, that reality needs to be addressed.

45:58

The organizations that approach me usually have highly-skilled people working on high-stakes challenges, which is often code for people die when the challenge isn’t met – military, healthcare, education, and some certain high-tech organizations. Those are the organizations that understand when and how these teams need to coordinate. They need to understand each other’s weaknesses and strengths, and there needs to be trust there enough that they can handle the challenges in the dynamic world. And so, what do you do? You need to schedule it, and that usually includes budgeting for it. And when you bring people together, you have to use a system that’s more sophisticated than what I call gather and hope. Like, “We bought the hamburgers! We bought the beer! It should be great, right?” It’s a strategy. We’ve already talked about one organization that tried that, and now their lawyer’s involved. And I’m like what did you think was gonna happen? [Laughs] You let people who don’t know each other, don’t trust each other into a room with alcohol, and people said things that they don’t know how to work out. Is what I’m talking about gonna solve all things? No. But it can hit off a lot of stuff. And we haven’t talked about how do we make campfires that are not just a waste of time, and this is really important to talk about.

In my work, I say when we’re bringing strangers together, a campfire is five people or less. And that’s not just because I like five. If anyone listening researches the Brook’s Lines of Communication, you’ll see, and the diagrams will show that when we add people it dramatically increases the number of relationships in a group that need to be managed. And we’re all managing relationships. There are power dynamics, there are cultural issues, there are gender issues. When we increase a group from five to six, that one person increases the number of relationships getting managed by 50%, one person. And when we go up from there, it starts getting silly, and that’s why you’ve never sat at a table of ten at a wedding for three hours and stood up at the end of that wedding and thought, “What a wonderful deep conversation I had with these people. I feel so close to them. I can’t wait to talk to them again.” It’s never happened. There’s just too much to manage.

48:10

So when I talk about campfire experiences, amongst things we need to look at is is this a small enough group that there’s the opportunity for intimate conversation that’s gonna lead to something other than platitudes, posturing, and then drunken argument?

Rebecca Ching: What do you say — because I’m thinking about you could probably tell story upon story of leaders in a variety of capacities that would buy the hamburgers or whatever the thing, kind of the hope and gathering, right?

Charles Vogl: Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Ching: And then when you nudge them and say, “That’s actually not gonna cut it. You have to be with people,” what are some of the common whether it’s objections or fears that you see folks rumble with because that’s involving intimacy and sitting with their own feelings too.

Charles Vogl: Yeah. So the good news is I’ve been talking about this long enough and talked to people in enough places, enough organizations, and I’ve actually written guidelines to help people in leadership roles that want to create better events effectively connecting with people that are important to them, and those are free downloads on my website www.charlesvogl.com. And just go to “Growth Resources” and “Downloads” and it’s free.

So in the time that we have here, one of the things that is important is you have to be clear about the intention. What I see is, “Hey, we’re ordering pizza at the park. You should come,” or “Oh, we’re all going bowling,” and bowling could be great, but if what I really want is a richer understanding of the people I depend on at work or the people who are asking for stuff at work and they drive me crazy and I want to know, “What is going on with you,” or say, “Hey, you’ve got to back off because I can’t handle this,” pizza’s not that interesting and neither is bowling. That doesn’t mean there can’t be bowling there or there can’t be pizza, but the understanding is be really clear.