Cool Down (7 page)

Can you identify presenteeism in yourself? In your colleagues? If a colleague was suffering with a fever and was obviously fading fast, common sense would tell you to send that person home. Presenteeism is not so obvious, however. It needs to be identified and dealt with, in yourself and others. This is a practiced skill.

The fourth silo effect at work is that of intellectual isolation. This problem is best illustrated by another book,
A Whole New Mind
, by Daniel Pink, which, when paired with
The World Is Flat
by Thomas Friedman, helps paint a clear picture of the cost of improperly adapting to the changing demands of business. Specifically, Pink outlines the need for a new mindset. He demonstrates how the “other” side of the brain, the creative side, is more necessary than ever, even amidst traditionally logical detail-oriented professions such as accounting and law. He writes:

Pink and Freidman point to the rapidly emerging technologies that make up the wired and wireless world. These are flattening the world out, they say, allowing business to be done anywhere and anytime. And that's great, for some things. It's faster and cheaper to send digital blueprints by email than to courier the originals, but what of the synergies that would come up with a building's conception and financing in the first place? What of the human elements that go into anticipating and understanding the intangibles that always occur in every project?

Recently the mass transit rail system of a major North American city noticed something disturbing: More and more of their engineers were calling in sick on Fridays than on any other day. And when the engineers don't come to work, the trains don't roll. Though a few of these engineers could have been legitimately excused as ill, many of them had excused themselves simply because they were too tired and stressed, and believed that they could not operate their trains safely. As a result certain scheduled runs had to be cancelled, and thousands of commuters had to find alternate ways to travel. The economy of an entire city was affected.

 

Now on the surface this case study appears to only be about absenteeism. But it's important to observe why and how such absenteeism was allowed to develop and flourish in the first place. What if it was discovered that all of the scheduling of these engineers had been done through email or electronic calendaring? Such tools are convenient, yes, but they are also sterile. They are made up of digitized text and numbers. This creates a situation in which the managers who allocate the routes or the shifts, managers who themselves are likely overburdened, are forced to assign tasks to people they cannot see. This is not communicating. Human communication is an organic, interactive thing. It requires more than just words. As sentient creatures, we human beings take in most of our knowledge through a combination of senses. In terms of human communication this means body language (non-verbal communication), eye contact, inflection, and vocal tone, in addition to the words spoken.

A manager who is allowed the time to visit with her staff, or even talk to them by telephone might be able to pick up on subtle pauses, tonalities, or other cues that twig her to the fact that even though her employee says “yes” to a job request, the non-verbal element of the conversation tells a different story. This is an example of the “high touch” ideal that Daniel Pink refers to. It takes more time to execute, but saves more in the long run.

Amy Schuilman, a partner in the law firm of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, is one of a dozen high-profile executives who were interviewed by
Fortune
magazine for a feature entitled “How I Work,” which sought to identify just how these successful people get through their day. Ms. Schuilman revealed a terrific insight into the nature of email, cell phones, and true human connection. Even though she herself answers hundreds of emails a day, she has a system
and
a pair of assistants to help control this influx and keep it manageable. She says:

 

You see that? Rhythm! Not just book smarts, but rhythm! A knowledge of how people act and respond on a level separate from that of just words. Ms. Schuilman takes advantage of the principle of rhythm, not merely to express her own ideas, but to ensure that the person with whom she's talking does not feel stress through anticipation of being cut off. That's true human insight.

Of course, it is much easier, physically, emotionally, and time-wise, to electronically dispatch a request, a problem, an issue or an assignment to another human being, but there is no room in such a unidirectional messaging system for true discussion. And this is what I'm really getting at here. The pressure we feel to deal with issues quickly and to avoid having to take time to explain them or give them further depth makes us want to turn to fast communications first. But those very technologies actually tend to prolong the exercise or even deny its successful completion.

Bruno and Karen work for a financial services company. They both have full schedules and tight deadlines to meet. Around 3:00 p.m., Karen emails Bruno and asks him for his thoughts on a project scheduled for the spring. Bruno looks up from his work when the email arrives. The subject line says only, “Spring Promotion ideas,” but since it's from Karen, his boss, he feels obliged to look at it right away. He breaks completely away from his current train of thought and opens the email. It asks Bruno for his thoughts, so he dutifully starts to pound away at his keyboard. Some of the ideas, he knows, may go against Karen's own plans, but others might hit the mark, and at any rate he feels safer putting them all in the message. “At least then, it will be on record that I suggested these things,” he thinks to himself, “even if Karen shoots them down.”

The email takes about half an hour to write, proof, correct, and then send, amidst other distractions that add to an already backlogged day. Finally, Bruno sends the email. Since Karen is currently stuck in back-to-back meetings and will be for the duration of the afternoon, Bruno's response sits in her inbox for two hours until she returns to her desk at 5:40 p.m. Too tired to read it now, she opts to save it for the train ride home, when she can read it at leisure from the inbox of her wireless PDA.

The train, as usual, is packed, and far from quiet. Karen starts to read Bruno's letter, but cannot think clearly. Fatigue from a long day and too many loud conversations around her make it hard to stay focused. She opts to respond to it later, after the kids are in bed. Finally, late in the evening, Karen gets around to responding to Bruno's thoughts. She keys in some thoughts and ideas of her own, some in agreement with Bruno, some with politely phrased reservation. The email is dispatched to Bruno at 11:15 p.m., and Karen goes to bed. Still wired from working into the late evening, she tosses and turns for an hour or more.

Bruno gets in around 9:00 a.m. the next morning, and checks his email. He sees the response from Karen, and sees that it's a long one. But he has no time to read it then, as he's already late for a 9:00 a.m. meeting. The message waits until 10:30 a.m. And so the saga continues. Over the next two days, the sequence of soliloquies bounces back and forth, carefully addressing points of contention and attempting to summarize what looks to be a very large project. Each response requires time to type and time to wait. Days pass. And both Karen and Bruno remark to their spouses how they don't know where the time goes. They say there's just too much to do and that they'll have to spend part of the weekend, probably Sunday, catching up.

Meanwhile, over in a different department of the same company, a different manager, Lisa, decides she needs to talk to one of her own people, Vern, about their own Spring campaign. Lisa picks up her phone and calls Vern. Seeing that it's his boss on the phone, Vern picks up. Lisa's tone conveys her need to talk about this spring issue; it carries layers of urgency and empathy that resonate well with Vern. It pleases him that his manager, as busy as she is, recognizes the work he is putting into their various projects, and her acknowledgement feels good. She says she needs to talk to him this afternoon and would he be available sometime in the next half hour.

Vern says, “Let me finish my train of thought on this other project, and I'll come to see you in exactly 10 minutes.” Lisa has always liked Vern's exactness with regard to time and knows he will be true to his promise to arrive in exactly 10 minutes. Since she knows exactly how much time she has, she takes the opportunity to return a couple of matter-of-fact emails confirming upcoming travel arrangements.

Ten minutes later, Vern arrives at her office. They discuss the spring campaign for 20 minutes. Taking subtle cues from eye contact, body language, and vocal tone, they are able to address the more contentious issues and arrive at an action plan that is workable and mutually pleasing. In fact, they enjoy a five-way communication structure:

The total time spent from initial phone call to conclusion: 30 minutes.

 

The silo that Bruno and Karen find themselves in is a creativity silo, based on the misconception that speed is the optimum answer for issues requiring human creativity. Further, the fear of the loop makes them think that all communications must be done via email in order that they become part of the “paper trail” or “audit trail,” a concern otherwise known as the “CYA (Cover Your Assets) Factor.”

The dividend that Vern and Lisa enjoy is obvious: greater productivity, shortened timelines, heightened understanding, and reduced stress. They incorporate the CYA factor only at the end, as a confirmation and summary of their mutual creativity.

Let's suggest, realistically, that the exercise that Vern and Lisa went through saved them just 50 minutes each (they probably saved more than that). Later, we'll return to this number and see what those 50 minutes saved can now do for them.

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate some of the larger scale costs of living and working at high speed. It proposes that a solution can be found through slowing down, or
cooling down
enough to inject a greater amount of person-to-person communication, which leads to greater control, vision, understanding, and productivity in the human-work relationship. Later chapters will deliver additional concrete examples of how to incorporate this into your life, but let's close this chapter by observing how high-speed results in one final form of theft, caused by candid reactionism. This can be illustrated using two different scenarios: the first, being robbed in a train station and the second, attending meetings.

For the professional pickpocket, one of the best tools he could invest in is a wall-mounted sign that reads “Beware of Pickpockets.” With this unlikely device, he needs simply to hang this sign on the wall of a railway or bus station and then sit back and observe as legions of well-meaning people casually pat their pockets or purses, reassuring themselves that their valuables are where they should be, all the while giving the thief clear instructions on where to find the goods.