You can work alongside someone for years and still know them almost entirely through their role. You know what they're responsible for, what they're working on this quarter, what they need from you by Friday. The relationship works. It just runs along a narrow track, and the two of you rarely step off it.
Then something small happens.
They mention what they did over the weekend and it turns out you do the same thing. A conversation about a trip lands on a city you both know well. They talk about a piece of music, a sport, a dish someone in their family used to make, and you catch a flicker of your own life in what they're describing. The subject has nothing to do with work, and yet the next conversation feels slightly different.
That's the quiet thing common ground does. For a moment it lets two people see each other as more than their titles - not colleague and colleague, or client and supplier, but two people who happened to recognize something in each other. Often that recognition matters more than whatever prompted it.
To create social closeness, humans engage in a variety of social activities centered around shared experiences. (Wolf & Tomasello, 2020)
We tend to assume real common ground has to be substantial: a shared history, a big life event, a conviction you both hold. More often it's ordinary. A taste in music. A childhood memory. A place, a habit, a small daily annoyance you both live with. Any of these can produce that faint but genuine sense of oh, you too.
These moments rarely announce themselves. They tend to arrive in the margins - the couple of minutes before a call properly starts, a remark dropped on the way out of a room, an aside that has nothing to do with the reason you're both there. It's easy to talk over them when you're in a hurry to get to the point. Catching them is mostly a matter of not being in too much of a rush.
So you don't have to hunt for something remarkable. You mostly have to be paying enough attention to notice what's already surfacing. Someone mentions an interest outside work and you realise you share it. You can say so, ask them to tell you more, or simply hold on to it and pick up the thread next time.
That last option is the one people underrate.
Say a colleague mentions they've started training for a marathon. A week later you ask how it's going. It's a tiny gesture, and it tells them something - you'd taken it in, and you remembered. What came up once has carried into the next conversation, and the relationship starts to acquire a small history of its own, separate from the work you happen to share.
It's worth being honest about the limits. You can't manufacture this. People can tell the difference between genuine interest and a technique, and a forced connection usually lands worse than none at all. The skill isn't in producing common ground on demand. It's in noticing the real thing when it appears and giving it a little room, instead of steering straight back to the agenda.
You can also simply miss it. Plenty of capable people move through their working lives treating every exchange as strictly business, and their relationships stay perfectly functional and perfectly flat. Nothing goes wrong, exactly. It's more that nothing deepens, and years on they know the people around them no better than they did at the start.
None of it takes much. Catch the personal detail people offer almost in passing. When something genuinely connects to your own experience, let that show rather than letting it slide by. Then follow up later - the follow-up is what turns a good moment into a thread.
For leaders this counts more than it first appears, because so much of the work rests on the relationships underneath it. Someone who feels understood beyond their function tends to speak more openly, raise problems earlier, and extend a little more trust. A team member starts to see you as a person who notices them, not just their output. A client finds the harder conversations easier to open. A senior colleague remembers not only what you delivered but what you were like to work with.
The common ground itself might be almost nothing - a band, a hometown, a shared dislike of early meetings. What grows out of it, given time, can be a good deal larger.
THE EXECUTIVE PRESENCE MINDSET SHIFT
From: What do we have in common?
To: What shared experience might already be sitting inside this conversation?
3 ways to practice this week
- Pick up on one personal detail in your next three stakeholder conversations. Notice what people mention about their interests, their lives, the things they do outside work. When something connects to your own experience, let it into the conversation instead of moving straight on.
- Follow one shared interest forward. If someone mentions a hobby, a book, a trip, or an event, ask about it the next time you speak. Let the relationship carry across conversations rather than resetting each time.
- Notice the ordinary things you share. The small points of connection are easy to overlook - a place, a preference, a cultural reference, a common frustration. They often do more work than the impressive ones.