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.

Seemingly erratic behavior by customers or managers cannot be understood without considering their beliefs and circumstances.

I had worked in technology consulting for less than a year when I started to realize that all of our clients were “crazy.” At least that’s what most of my co-workers thought, and I was starting to agree with them.

For a while, I wondered if it was us. Was there something special that our company offered that seemed to attract the biggest loons? So, I changed jobs to work with different clients and different co-workers. But those clients were crazy, too. (Even crazier, actually.)

By that time, I had a large enough sample size that I needed to start re-thinking my hypothesis. It wasn’t statistically possible that everyone in our organization was sane while everyone in their organization was nuts. This re-considering also happend to coincide with moving to a more senior position within my new company.

In spite of what my former peers might have thought, I hadn’t joined the dark side or become a bubblehead after sticking an upper management title on my business card. I had simply acquired more context, because I had more access to the beliefs and constraints that were driving the clients’ decisions. And although I was able to confirm that a few of them were really, truly nuts, most of them weren’t.

Instead of wondering why we were suddenly trashing a component of a product that seemed to be central to its appeal in the middle of the project (leading me to conclude once again, that the client was crazy), I saw it as a rational decision made under budget or competitor duress. I also started to get the sense that the client might think we were crazy, too. Maybe we were.

I have since come to the conclusion that most people are almost always acting rationally IF (and that’s a really big “if”), you take into consideration both their circumstances and their beliefs. And that is where the rub is. Most people don’t go around spouting what their beliefs are. In fact, some people aren’t always aware of what their beliefs are. Further complicating the issue is that most of us also assume that our beliefs are the same as others.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a manager and I believe that technology is the same as magic. So, as your boss, I would like you to invent a perpetual motion machine. You, the proud owner of an undergraduate degree in physics, explain to me that it will not be possible. Because, according to important laws of the universe, eventually our machine would come to a grinding halt.

“But why?” I ask.

“Because of laws that have to do with friction and thermodynamics,” you say.

“I think those are just excuses,” I say.

This could go on forever, until, ideally one day you uncover the fact that I believe in magic, and I actually believe that you are really a magician, even though your job title says technical developer. Making this discovery is unlikely to make you change my belief, but at least now you have a better understanding of my point-of-view. This is crucial to your communication with me (and my communication with you, incidentally).

So, next time, you think someone is just crazy, poke around and try to find out why they might be acting that way. Consider who they are and what circumstances they’re in. If you can get outside your own crazy ideas, they might just seem a little more sane after all.
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What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how we can help you communicate with the crazy people, visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick M. Lencioni

This book is good, but not that good. The first problem is that this book is an allegory. While this is a helpful method of teaching, it also tends to oversimplify problems and their proposed solutions. Teamwork, especially at the leadership level, is one of the most challenging problems that companies face. This is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is leadership egos — something that the author does a very nice job of describing and deconstructing.

However to apply the principles presented in this book would be difficult unless you are an especially creative or powerful leader. Most leaders don’t have the opportunity to fire people or remove them for the team (something that happens not once, but twice in this book). While I agree that this can be the most effective method of improving team dynamics, for a lot of leaders, it isn’t a realistic option for most people.

I did appreciate, however, how much the author focuses on trust and the willingness to have, and work through, conflict. This is true of any relationship, including co-workers, friendships and even marriage. This book is an easy, enjoyable read, but it runs the risk of simply being a platform for Lencioni’s consulting firm. Please give us more depth or consider marketing this as a case study.