Too Busy to Think 

By Sarah Gilbert

Overloaded managers run the risk of making bad decisions and alienating themselves from important information

Everyone has had a conversation with someone who clearly wasn’t listening. You know the signs. Maybe their eyes keep drifting toward their computer monitor or they keep making faces at people in the hall. This person probably thinks they are multi-tasking, a favorite pastime of the overbooked, but mostly they are just absorbing less information and being rude at the same time.

Running from one meeting to the next or spending lots of time responding to e-mail and voicemail actually can be a recipe for becoming more out of touch. It seems like a paradox, but using all this new technology to stay in touch, might be sending the wrong message to people who really need to speak with you. And it’s probably not giving you much time to really process the information, either.

Consider this scenario: A project manager got a funny sense yesterday that there was really something wrong with the data center. (Smoke was coming from a few of the servers, but not a lot of smoke.) But the project manager doesn’t want to alarm you, and isn’t sure whether or not smoke should be coming from the data center, so she sent you an e-mail. You didn’t respond. She thought that you lack of response meant that smoke in the data center wasn’t a big deal, so she decided to wait to see what would happen.

The next day there was even more smoke coming from the data center. Now, she was more worried. Maybe you didn’t get her e-mail, so she decided to stop by your office. You’re there, but running off to a meeting. You give her all the signs that you’re doing something that is a very high priority (lack of eye contact, shuffling things around on your desk, grabbing a cell phone, ignoring a ringing desk phone). She starts to tell you about the smoke coming from the data cemter, but you are interupted by a call on your cell phone.

The next day the data center blows up. You, the multi-tasking manager, can’t believe that this is happening. You are so accessible. You have an open-door policy. You have e-mail, a cell phone, a work phone, a Blackberry and people like YOU! How could you not have known that the data center was in so much trouble?

Well………. In spite of what you think you are doing, you are out of touch. Rushing around being really busy might make you feel like you are doing more in less time, but you’re sending the wrong signals to key people who should be telling you important information. And don’t even try to blame them! (I know you’re thinking it.) Furthermore (and this is probably the bigger problem), all that rushing around isn’t giving you any time to think. Good communication takes concentrated, conservative effort.

A single, well-constructed set of e-mails, phone calls and meetings is much more effective at communicating a set of well-constructed ideas than 100 meetings, phone calls and e-mails to see “what people think,” “brainstorm” or “get some feedback.”

The reality is that we are often getting too much feedback. Without the time to stop and consider what it all means, we’re not really communicating at all. We’re just throwing words at each other. So, stop reading this article and stare at the wall for 15 minutes. You just might learn something.

Sarah Gilbert is a project management consultant and can be reached at sarah.gilbert@what-if-project.com.

Filed under Communications