It seems to me that our daily responsiveness is decreasing in spite of the increase in the number of tools we have to stay in touch. We use email, voicemail, smart phones, audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, online presentations, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes we actually sit down and look each other in the eye, though this may be an endangered activity. I have meetings where we all sit at our cubicles, a hand’s breadth from each other and join the meeting by conference call. What is that about???
With all these great toys, and the assumption that no one is all that far from a transmission medium, why is it that I still need to send email after email, leave voicemail after voicemail, have meeting after meeting and sometimes just grab people by the collar in the hallway before something gets done? I can think of lots of reasons why it’s so difficult. Crazy busy. Slipped my mind. Something came up. Boss called a meeting. Flat tire. YaddaYadda. I can’t argue with any of these, I’ve been there myself.
But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think the looming reality of so many ways to connect seduces us into thinking we are actually communicating. And the absence of the requirement to actually show up for a meeting means we are listening with one ear while we doing something else. We fool ourselves that we are paying attention, but we would probably be hard pressed to repeat what was said in the past 5 sentences. So action items go unexecuted, and decisions are forgotten, and people don’t follow through on their commitments.
Let’s take this one step further, past the operational aspects of how you title an email, or leave a voice message, or make use of the alarm function in your smartphone to get people’s attention. Let’s talk about personal responsibility, and the struggle most of us have when it comes to taking it. We have unfortunately confused the taking of responsibility with accepting blame, and our survival instincts militate against it. Blame means punishment, pain, embarrassment, rejection, and avoiding it starts early. Toddlers who can barely talk will point vaguely out the window at an invisible perpetrator when Mom comes in and says, “Who threw the spaghetti on the floor?”
Unfortunately, being effective at whatever we do requires that we accept personal responsibility. Making excuses is all well and good, but at the end of the day, we either do or we don’t do.Unfortunately, the more lines of communication we have running, the more our electronic tentacles will bind us, and the more commitments we will be asked to make. We want to be good corporate citizens, so we end up taking on more than we can handle, and dancing as fast as we can, hoping that the impossible commitment we just made will magically come out all right. Or we simply fail to respond, as we can’t be held accountable for something we never agreed to in the first place.
It’s not an easy proposition, but we must learn to take this glut of messages and information and slow down the information transfer to a speed we can handle if we are going to thrive in today’s communication overload. When I take a few moments to reflect on my breadth of commitments, and triage my incoming requests, I create a sorting process that allows me to function at my most productive. If I try to be in too many places at once, or go on radio silence, I continue to disappoint myself and my stakeholders. To create, build, deliver and prosper, I need to be as consistently reliable as I am accessible, and remain accountable for my actions. So in that spirit…Mom? The spaghetti? I guess you could say that was… me.
____________________
Courtney Behm holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Performing Arts and Communication, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. In her corporate career, she has worked for wildly successful companies, and those struggling to stay afloat in the ocean of change. Through her consulting company, Viewpoint Solutions (www.ViewpointSolutions.com), she has helped a diverse client base, including Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, find creative solutions to classic business problems. An accomplished speaker, Courtney uses a combination of language, humor, insight and front-line experience to offer a fresh perspective on life in the fast lane. In 2006, she returned to the corporate world, and is currently Senior Project Manager at i365, A Seagate Company. She is writing a book on how to lead effectively in a time of constant change, and collaborating on a book on Personal Career Management.
With all these great toys, and the assumption that no one is all that far from a transmission medium, why is it that I still need to send email after email, leave voicemail after voicemail, have meeting after meeting and sometimes just grab people by the collar in the hallway before something gets done? I can think of lots of reasons why it’s so difficult. Crazy busy. Slipped my mind. Something came up. Boss called a meeting. Flat tire. YaddaYadda. I can’t argue with any of these, I’ve been there myself.
But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think the looming reality of so many ways to connect seduces us into thinking we are actually communicating. And the absence of the requirement to actually show up for a meeting means we are listening with one ear while we doing something else. We fool ourselves that we are paying attention, but we would probably be hard pressed to repeat what was said in the past 5 sentences. So action items go unexecuted, and decisions are forgotten, and people don’t follow through on their commitments.
Let’s take this one step further, past the operational aspects of how you title an email, or leave a voice message, or make use of the alarm function in your smartphone to get people’s attention. Let’s talk about personal responsibility, and the struggle most of us have when it comes to taking it. We have unfortunately confused the taking of responsibility with accepting blame, and our survival instincts militate against it. Blame means punishment, pain, embarrassment, rejection, and avoiding it starts early. Toddlers who can barely talk will point vaguely out the window at an invisible perpetrator when Mom comes in and says, “Who threw the spaghetti on the floor?”
Unfortunately, being effective at whatever we do requires that we accept personal responsibility. Making excuses is all well and good, but at the end of the day, we either do or we don’t do.Unfortunately, the more lines of communication we have running, the more our electronic tentacles will bind us, and the more commitments we will be asked to make. We want to be good corporate citizens, so we end up taking on more than we can handle, and dancing as fast as we can, hoping that the impossible commitment we just made will magically come out all right. Or we simply fail to respond, as we can’t be held accountable for something we never agreed to in the first place.
It’s not an easy proposition, but we must learn to take this glut of messages and information and slow down the information transfer to a speed we can handle if we are going to thrive in today’s communication overload. When I take a few moments to reflect on my breadth of commitments, and triage my incoming requests, I create a sorting process that allows me to function at my most productive. If I try to be in too many places at once, or go on radio silence, I continue to disappoint myself and my stakeholders. To create, build, deliver and prosper, I need to be as consistently reliable as I am accessible, and remain accountable for my actions. So in that spirit…Mom? The spaghetti? I guess you could say that was… me.
____________________
Courtney Behm holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Performing Arts and Communication, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. In her corporate career, she has worked for wildly successful companies, and those struggling to stay afloat in the ocean of change. Through her consulting company, Viewpoint Solutions (www.ViewpointSolutions.com), she has helped a diverse client base, including Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, find creative solutions to classic business problems. An accomplished speaker, Courtney uses a combination of language, humor, insight and front-line experience to offer a fresh perspective on life in the fast lane. In 2006, she returned to the corporate world, and is currently Senior Project Manager at i365, A Seagate Company. She is writing a book on how to lead effectively in a time of constant change, and collaborating on a book on Personal Career Management.
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