If the Boss Asks You the Time, Don’t Tell Her How to Build a Watch
3 Tips for Curing Watchmaker Syndrome
Just about everyone knows someone that never got the memo on how to get to the point in conversations. I warmly reference these people in my mind as Watchmakers. Instead of giving you the time of day when you ask for it, they tell you in painful detail how to build the watch.
While command of detail is impressive, the need to share it with everyone that you come in contact with can be debilitating to your career. Bosses avoid opening even casual conversations, groups are hesitant to draw watchmakers into discussions and co-workers have been known to begin thinking of creative ways to extract themselves from your conversations, even as you are approaching.
Any Watchmakers in Your Life?
I come from a long family of digressers on one side of my family, and conversations with these wonderful people can be truly amazing adventures. You start out heading in one direction and 30-minutes later you’ve been on a verbal odyssey that completely doesn’t tie to the original point and has left you filled with new context and wondering how once again you managed to get lost. It’s a challenge and a bit of fun actually to try to nicely manage the conversation towards the original intent. At work however, this is just frustrating.
Unfortunately, most people that resemble my Watchmaker description don’t know that they communicate in this fashion, so it might pay to find someone you trust to be brutally honest with you and ask them about your communication style.
3 Tips to Learn to Tell the Time…Not How to Build the Watch:
Whether you are the Watchmaker in question or you manage one of these individuals, here are some tips for helping them do a better job staying on-point:
1. Help Watchmakers understand the importance of brevity in formal settings…especially with senior managers or customers. Ensure that you provide tangible examples that you’ve observed and tie this good feedback to business issues, personal and group effectiveness and performance.
2. Encourage pre-thinking of key points for planned, formal settings. I use a technique that I learned from a P.R. pro called message mapping. This can be done in a matter of minutes…and I use it constantly. Describe your core point in the center of the map…allow 4 branches for supporting points…and then each supporting point is allowed one or two branches for additional detail. The key of course to the message map is then to use it to make points and answer questions. While it takes some practice to perfect, this technique can truly help increase the relevance and impact of your brief points.
3. Learn to flip the switch. Learning to recognize impending communication situations and trigger the response of “OK, I need to make my key point and nothing more,” is a difficult but necessary habit to form. Perhaps it’s a bit of classical conditioning, but the best communicators run through this pre-event processing to determine what they will say and how they will conduct themselves. I’m convinced that this is something that can be learned and reinforced with help from an observant manager, mentor or friend.
–
While it’s difficult to change your core communication style, it is important to recognize the need in many circumstances for clarity and brevity. A college professor of mine always emphasized on exams that “brevity displays knowledge of the subject matter,” and those words have echoed in my mind ever since. Regale your family with stories and digress to your heart’s content around the kitchen table. But when it comes to work, get on-point, make and reinforce your point and then be quiet! Get good at this and you’ll actually create more opportunities to contribute!
The Case of the Rapidly Shrinking Attention Span
I wrote a post last year entitled, “Yeah, Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply,” prompted by an article in Harvard Business Review. Judging by the posted comments as well as the e-mails that I received, the notion that we seem to almost discourage creating opportunities to think deeply about our business, our strategies and our jobs, resonates with many people.
Are we losing our ability to focus?
Maybe. Maybe we never had it, and it is the exception instead of the rule, but it just seems so much harder in this noisy, interruption-driven, always-on world to focus on an issue and work through it to creative, complete solutions. We’re too busy racing from one sound-bite opportunity to another, focusing our precious gray matter on topics for nanoseconds before the next interruption comes along.
If left alone without new stimuli for more than a few minutes, we seek them out on-line via social networking sites, through e-mail or even in the ubiquitous and mostly useless meetings that dominate our corporate calendars. Go a few minutes without an e-mail, and I’m willing to bet that you are worried that something is wrong.
I’ve discussed this with many other colleagues and neighbors, and perhaps it is generational, but we all see and sense the same chronic societal attention deficit disorder.
No one seems to pay attention for long. In the work environment, our cellphones and e-mail devices are on and we engage constantly about the urgent and often the unimportant. We don’t seem to solve and create as much as we should.
Our children only exist in “heavy noise” environments, where socializing includes talking, interacting with many on the web, texting on the cell phone, playing music and studying (??) all at the same time.
Social networking sites are powerful and exciting and valuable for certain things. I love LinkedIn and Twitter for the opportunities they afford to meet and connect with old and new acquaintances and for pure networking. However, they can also be addicting and suck precious time out of your days and nights interacting in sound-bites.
I’ve noticed that I struggle to read many books from cover to cover anymore. True, most of the books I’ve been reading lately are fairly boring business books, where all of the meat is in the introduction, the first chapter and the last chapter. Nonetheless, I find that I want the essence of the book quickly and then I want to move-on to my next intellectual stimulus.
During the few minutes that I’ve been writing this, a quick glance indicates that 3 new e-mails have come in, I’ve got several Twitter updates and someone has decided to follow me, so courtesy says I ping them back. I just received a blog comment that indicated my posts are too long (tough, don’t read them!), someone is dialing me on Skype, I have a fresh text from my son at college (definitely looking for money!) and I have a new voice mail message. THE NOISE IS DEAFENING!
OK, I’ve designed my work environment to allow for all of those interruptions, so I have no one to blame but myself. My guess is however, that your work environment is not too dissimilar. We have created an interruption-driven world where we consciously choose to be interrupted and not to think deeply.
The lack of deep thinking is not a good thing.
Maybe you can “Create” in this noisy environment, but I cannot do it effectively. Nor can most people that I know.
I need to wrap up this post and focus on a new leadership keynote, create some new tools for an upcoming workshop and get back to work on my e-book. I now turn off my internet connection and cell phone just to concentrate. The more I do this the more I create, solve, innovate and produce.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Be careful about becoming an actor in The Case of the Rapidly Shrinking Attention Span. As a leader, you want people and teams to focus. You need to create opportunities to create for your teams and for yourself.
Educate your associates on the power of focus and silence. Do the same for yourself. Don’t let your ability to think deeply be stolen by the false idol of Always-On communication.
Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World
Somewhere between the world I grew up in and the world that we are living in today, everything about working, leading and learning began to change. It’s increasingly a virtual world, and everything about communicating, interacting and developing relationships feels a bit different than it used to. While many/most of us are compliant with the changes in communications (telex to fax to e-mail to IM, web conferencing etc.), I wonder how many of us are truly working to become competent at living and working in this world.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the changes in how we live, learn, earn and engage, and I’m working hard to adapt.
- A valued colleague sends me a note expressing frustration over the challenges of leading remotely. I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time on this valuable topic. Stay tuned.
- I delivered a webinar and I realized that I have to get better at communicating without interaction. I’ve set a schedule to begin doing some of these blog posts as podcasts as a means of increasing my comfort and competence communicating to an invisible audience.
- I signed up to teach an on-line course expressly for the purpose of discovering what it means to “teach” on-line.
- My kids don’t use their phones for talking. If I want to reach them, I send a text message and get a response practically before I’m done typing. (I saw this coming a few years ago when I asked my youngest son why he never calls friends on the phone. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Why would I want to talk with one person when I can be on-line with all of my friends at the same time.”)
- An article at Fast Company indicates that in the next few years, technology will obliterate the need to travel. (Hmmm, I’m suspicious of the word obliterate.)
- I am busy working on an on-line content strategy to augment my own face-to-face seminar/workshop activities.
The common thread in all of these items is the shift in how we work, lead and learn. Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more virtual everyday, and those of us that are old enough to remember life before fax machines and e-mail will be well-served to quit fighting the trend and start learning how to become competent and comfortable communicating to no-one and everyone at the same time.
It was just a few years ago that I received my first request to fund an employee’s pursuit of an on-line degree. I am a staunch advocate of the importance of the face-to-face network developed at school, especially for MBA students, and while I approved the request, I recall challenging the value. Since that time, I know of dozens of professionals that have had great experiences earning degrees on-line. I still question whether there is any chance that you can develop a close network in that manner, but hey, this is the era of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, where it is seemingly more about contacts than close relationships. (I’m still suspicious of that premise.)
One of the critical leadership skills of our time is developing comfort and competence at leading distributed teams. There are still some firms that insist on their managers and leaders being housed within a line of sight, but they are showing their lack of understanding of how the world is changing. The literature on leading remotely seems to offer superficial guidance from people adapting old models to new situations. I suspect that as time moves on, the profession of leadership will evolve to take into account the very distinct skills and approaches needed to lead effectively while never coming into personal contact. (As a side note, I deal with many people on the receiving side of remote leadership. At best, the leader to employee relationships they describe are superficial. We haven’t figured this one out yet. )
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The difference between compliance with new technologies and new styles of communicating and competence at leveraging these tools and styles for results is significant. Deriving value from virtual leader/employee relationships or on-line learning is a very different task for all parties involved than it was in the almost bygone era of face-to-face. It’s time to quit fighting the changes and learn how to master the new opportunities to engage. I still struggle to see how these new methods will replicate the richness of face-to-face communication, but that’s my problem to deal with as the world keeps changing. In the meantime, if you are looking for me, don’t call…I’m busy learning how to communicate all over again.
-
Chosen by Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com as a top site in the Leadership category.
Podcast
Available Now!
Practical Lessons
e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
