SHUT
DOWN SOMETIME ALL e communication
A
manager’s effectiveness depends not only on using e-mail and other electronic
communication, but also on learning to shut it down.
The Offline Executive
Do you ever disconnect, even for
just a few minutes? Think about the last time you used your “off button.” Was it
at home over the weekend? On vacation? Or were you at the office? BlackBerrys,
iPhones, Androids, iPads, and all their digital relatives are transforming our
lives — for better and for worse. They are also changing the nature of how and
when (and where) work gets done.
This new reality has profound
implications for management, although studies on the topic have been
surprisingly limited. We know that managers at all levels spend at least half
their time collecting, receiving, and disseminating information. New
technologies have extended the speed and breadth of this communication across
vast distances. Yet studies going back a half century and more (long before
e-mail) have made it clear that managing is characterized by high levels of
variety, brevity, fragmentation, and, perhaps most significantly, interruption.
Often to managers’ detriment, their attention is frequently diverted from one
activity to another in their attempts to reconcile conflicting demands. The
first of these studies, carried out by Sune Carlson and involving managing
directors in Sweden in the late 1940s ― when the first computer was developed ―
found that managers were inundated with reports. If they only knew what was to
come.
Mobile computing seems to help
managers cope with these distractions effectively. Smartphones, for instance,
allow them to attend to the variety of demands on their time and leverage brief
moments between interruptions to complete minor tasks. But new technologies can
also have unintended negative and harassing effects; managers need to
understand the dangers of an overreliance on electronic communication.
Missing
the Meaning
Managing is not a science; it is a
subtle and nuanced practice, learned mostly on the job, through paying close
attention to gestures and tone of voice. This “soft information” is an integral
part of managing, and is gathered by talking and listening in meetings, during
chance encounters, or on the phone.
Using only words ― sending a text message or an e-mail ― takes away the nuance
that comes from seeing and hearing people, from exchanging points of view and
working toward agreements. Information technology can and should expand your
range of communication, but cannot be a substitute for interactions that build
trust, share vision, and enhance community.
Indeed, managers who are in touch only through their
keyboard are out of touch with the vast world beyond it. They risk substituting
breadth for depth. Recent research shows that we may
have more connections today, but fewer relationships. Facebook and LinkedIn can complement but not replace the personal
interactions at the heart of managing effectively. Managers who believe
that they can learn about their department through e-mail — rarely walking down
the hall, let alone getting on an airplane — may find themselves in trouble.
They’ll gather the facts, but they may miss the meaning. And the increasing use
of 140-character tweets to convey impressions of an organization or a person
will likely result in an even greater loss of nuance.
New technologies can also aggravate the hectic pace and
distraction inherent in managerial work, sometimes causing managers to behave
unreasonably. For example, a manager may send a
text message at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday to announce a meeting at 8:30 a.m. on
Monday. Or a manager might follow up on a request for information sent by
e-mail after waiting only an hour for a response. These more and more commonly
accepted practices disrupt work–life balance, interrupt one’s ability to focus,
and erode cognitive capabilities. The
more often someone feels compelled to check their e-mail or phone, the harder
it is to focus on the task at hand.
This may also cause people to miss the big picture. Numerous analyses of the financial crisis showed executives
overly focused on responding quickly to the competition, getting bogged down in
the specifics of a deal, and failing to see beyond the immediate future. By giving managers the illusion of control,
the rapid flow of information through new technologies threatens to rob them of
real control. As demands pile up, managing can become more frenetic and
superficial.
Less
Chatter, More Substance
The good news is, you can regain control. But to do so, you
need to know the extent of your problem. After
reading this article, you may wish to do the following exercise. First, tally
the number of e-mails and texts you received during a given week. Second,
calculate the portion of those messages for which some action on your part was
required. Third, calculate your send/receive ratio (the number of messages you
sent divided by those you received). Finally, look at your origination rate
(the percentage of sent messages that you initiated, rather than messages that
originated elsewhere to which you replied).
In one of the lightest workweeks of
the year, just after New Year’s, one of the authors conducted this exercise. He
received 294 e-mails, not counting those caught by spam filters. Only 46 (about
15 percent) required a response, 107 (about one-third) went unread (because
either the subject line said it all, the information was obsolete, or he
regarded it as junk mail), and the rest were “for information” but could
require significant time and attention down the road. He sent 64 e-mails, or
one for each 4.6 received, giving him a send/receive ratio of 0.22. Of the
messages sent, 33 were responses to some of the 294 messages received (a little
more than 10 percent), 13 were messages received and forwarded to someone else
to handle (about 5 percent), and 18 were messages he initiated (6 percent of
the total received).
Assuming that the 46 action items
took an average of 10 minutes each to handle, a full day of work was consumed.
Add to that the 18 messages he initiated, at, say, 15 minutes each, and you
have another half day. Let’s say he spent a minute each to prioritize the 294
incoming messages, and another half day is gone. In one of the lightest e-mail
weeks of the year, almost half of a regular 40-hour week was spent handling
e-mail! And if we think about this in the context of the approximately 247
billion e-mails sent daily (as of 2010, according to the market research firm
Radicati Group Inc.), the scope and potential cost of the problem become more
apparent.
Using the data you gather about your own e-mail habits, you
can take measures such as the following to decrease the chatter and accentuate
the substance:
• Reduce the volume. The more traffic you put on a network and the more people
you involve, the more messages you should expect in return. Hold back from
sending some messages until you have considered and reconsidered whether you
really have something to say (and who needs to hear it).
• Segment your e-mail. You might have multiple e-mail addresses: one broadly
promoted and monitored by an assistant, who has been trained to prioritize, delegate,
and reply on your behalf; another open only to those in selected e-mail
categories (like your clients and colleagues); and a third for a small circle
of contacts, friends, and family members. Some may also have a fourth, used
when registering or purchasing online, that is likely to generate spam.
• Utilize e-mail tools. Although few individuals take full advantage of these
features, most e-mail client programs have built-in mechanisms, such as filters
and rules, for regulating and organizing information flow. Status messages ―
such as “out of office” notices ― can manage others’ expectations. As
electronic assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, increase in sophistication, they
are being programmed to extract underlying tasks from e-mails and gather the
information needed to complete them.
• Create individual downtime. Managing your e-mail is one thing, but sometimes you need
to escape from it. You can try the strategy used by Danah Boyd of Microsoft,
who periodically declares an e-mail sabbatical and ceases all electronic
communication (she recommends doing it for a minimum of two weeks). If that’s
too extreme, you can choose to respond only within certain windows of time in
the day, and block out “offline” hours in your calendar. During these times,
you can turn on your “out of office” message to let people know that your response
may be delayed…for the 10 percent of messages that may actually need a
response.
• Create organizational downtime. Nathan Zeldes, formerly of Intel, has been a thought leader
in this area, cataloguing and promoting ideas such as organizational “quiet time,”
e-mail quotas, message chargeback and accounting systems, and limited-access
e-mail servers. Volkswagen AG has stopped its BlackBerry servers from routing
e-mails when employees are off-shift (this applies to union members in Germany,
and senior management is exempt); other companies are declaring “no e-mail”
periods over important holidays; still others, such as Paris-based IT services
company Atos SA, are contemplating banning the internal use of e-mail
altogether.
• Make a fresh start. Those who feel overwhelmed, like Wired columnist and
Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, have sometimes declared “e-mail
bankruptcy.” Out with the old e-mail address and in with the new one. Starting
over, you can develop better habits in sending, receiving, and responding to
messages, while severing connections with those whom you prefer to leave
behind.
• Power down. When all else fails, remember that you can turn off every
one of these electronic devices. In our leadership development programs at
McGill University, we routinely remind executive attendees to slow down, step
back, and reflect thoughtfully on their own experiences. But that doesn’t just
happen; you have to make it part of your management routine.
These are all significant steps, and
none of them are easy. They require saying no to forces that,
consciously or unconsciously, assume that you will always be available. As the
CEO of a major Canadian high-tech company once said about e-mail: “You can
never escape. You can’t go anywhere to contemplate, or think.” But that doesn’t
have to be true. You have a choice: Will you control technology so that it
works for you, or will you let it undermine your practice of management? It all
depends on how much attention you are willing to pay to your habits: the way they
are now, and the way they ought to be. And remember, there’s always an off
button. by Henry Mintzberg and Peter Todd s+b July 16,
2012
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