Once you have finished answering these questions, call up your manager and ask her for a meeting to talk about them. This combined technique of writing, thinking, discussing, and hearing yourself discuss the issues, will paint a clearer picture of what truly distinguishes you from your competition and how you can best satisfy the needs of your customers. This is a solid technique for banishing fear and replacing it with certainty.
Why Do People Read Books?
Here is an analogy that will help explain the value of using
slow
and tangible methods to confront fear and to ultimately ensure the vibrancy and longevity of your relationships with your customers. Think for a moment about why people still buy books: There is a value in the concept of “the tangible” that cannot be matched by high-speed replacements.
When the Internet started to flourish in the late 1990s many pundits declared the age of the paper book to be over, and they quickly welcomed the e-book as its replacement. They also declared how the paperless office would soon eliminate the need for excessive paper usage through the advent of on-screen media. But the lightning-quick e-book has not yet established any sort of firm foothold on the reading public, and currently more paper, not less, is being used in the offices and classrooms of the world. Certainly there have been changes in the book retail industry: Small, family-owned bookstores have been swallowed for the most part by big-box chains, yet people are still flocking to bookstores to buy books, and they're still printing out their PowerPoint presentations and Word documents by the millions.
Humans enjoy the look and feel of books, their design and layout, and most importantly, they enjoy, on an unconscious level, the way the brain processes printed material. Though there are e-books available, most consumers prefer to hold a paperback in their hands. And when it comes to important documents, a majority of business people will say that when they need to read them closely, they prefer the hard copy. Perhaps the greatest testament to the ongoing value people place in the opportunity to get lost in a good book are those millions of people of all ages who in recent years have willingly lugged around their hefty copies of
Harry Potter
in hardback.
What does all of this have to do with fear? Emotional stability comes largely from a connection to the tangible, which itself can only best be realized through
slow
. When people meet face to face, they learn more. When people plan out their actions, they do more. When they write out their fears, they solve more. You do not need to be a Hogwarts grad to master that type of magic.
FEAR OF BEING OUT OF THE LOOP
Chapter 2 also discusses the Loopâthat mode of existence that so many high-speed people claim never to want to leave. The point of the Chapter 2 section was to highlight its existence and to suggest its implicitly self-destructive bias. Now I would like to look at that fear: the fear behind being left out of the loop. Every week a new study comes out that shows that increasing numbers of people choose not to take their allotted vacation time, or if they do take it, they continue to check in regularly to get their email and stay informed. This fear of being left out of the loop is so profound and widespread that there are holiday hotels that promote among their services the offer to lock guests' wireless tools in the vault for the duration of their stay. Is this addiction to work due to the fact that work is so continually interesting, or is it based on fear of being left out?
We could imagine this analysis being played out in an updated version of the TV special,
A Charlie Brown Christmas
, in which Lucy sits at her psychiatrist's booth, facing her client, Charlie Brown, who holds his PDA close to his chest as he speaks
1
:
Charlie Brown: “I can't stand it. Every time I think I can take a day away from my chores, I have to keep looking at this thing.” (He looks at his wireless PDA.)
Lucy: “Hmmm. Maybe your problem is rooted in a deeper fear. Do you think you have a fear, Charlie Brown? If you have a fear of neglecting duty or responsibility, you have
paralipophobia
. If you have a fear of sitting still, you have
cathisophobia
. Or do you fear being forgotten? If you fear being forgotten you have
athazagoraphobia
.”
Charlie Brown: (Leaping up from his stool, but not letting go of his PDA.): “That's it!”
A Counseling Example
I ask the people I work with and coach privately a series of questions. These questions are not intended to prove that there is one single approach to work and one single schedule that everyone must follow. The role of the questioning, as with much in the world of analysis and therapy, is an exercise in slowing down. During our sessions, the client herself can hear her own statements. No longer drowned out by the emotional rush of pressure and speed, she can therefore judge them more objectively.
⢠I ask a client what would happen if she were out of the loop from say 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. (supper and sleep time). Would her business collapse? Would she lose her job? Sometimes the answer to this question is “yes,” or more precisely “yes, I think so.” More often, though, the answer is a reluctant “no.”
⢠I ask her to elaborate on how any potential job loss might happen and who is in charge of making it happen.
⢠I ask her what her definitions of her role are.
⢠I ask her how closely her definitions of her roles coincide with the definitions her manager has of them, and when they last checked in with each other on this issue.
⢠I ask her to state how long she plans to stay in this position, and what her mental, emotional, and career-oriented breaking points might be.
⢠Most important, I ask her to write down my questions and her answers.
It's fair to say that certain jobs are different, and there are requirements particular to each. If a client's job requires her to be on call for certain periods, that's fair enough. Maybe a lot of business gets done on Mondays and Tuesdays between 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. But for those clients who profess to be on call all day and night every day of the year, I ask them openly: What is driving this level of expectation, this willingness to put in a superhuman amount of on-call duty? Is it the company? The job? The boss? Or is it fear?
The Cost of Globalization
Sometimes the fear of being out of the loop is not internally driven but actually has its roots in the external world, specifically the global business world, where clients, suppliers, and co-workers from different hemispheres and time zones demand attention. It doesn't even have to be a “global” thing. Many North American workers struggle with the logistics of satisfying the needs of their colleagues on both coasts of their own country. When I see companies with global time allocation problems of this sort, I ask to see their standards manual or time zone policy. Usually they don't have one. And that reminds me of the good old days when email was just a pup.
When email technology was unleashed upon the world in the mid- to late-1990s, very few companies had any sort of operations guidelines. They were quick to legislate rules regarding personal use, the dissemination of confidential material, as well as a ban on pornographic and other hostile content, of course. But they offered very little guidance as to how the medium should be used.
To this day, there are hundreds upon hundreds of organizations that have not established comprehensive email policies. Nor have they quantified the cost, in dollars, hours, and productivity, that an underdeveloped email policy has wrought. The simplest example of this was described in Chapter 1, in which we saw how so many knowledge workers spend their prime productivity time responding to emails simply because they are there. To me that's like parking your car on the office flowerbed simply because it's closer to the door. Any company that has a global reach in terms of clients and/or suppliers needs to find the time to implement a time-zone strategy that ensures top-quality service from its head-office staff. That's obvious, of course. But let's look at an example.
Case Study: Time Trials
Joe works for ABC Company based in Boston. He puts in a full day of work and tries to get home by 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. most nights. The problem is, ABC's West Coast office has recently downsized some of its staff, and as a consequence, Joe has been assigned to take care of the needs of this team. Joe knows that every night he will receive two or more calls from the West Coast, since 8:30 p.m. on Joe's watch is only 5:30 p.m. Pacific time. Joe says he doesn't mind this, as he considers it to be part of his job, but he is starting to resent the imposition upon his personal time.
Given what you've learned about the chemistry of sleep and
presenteeism
, what might the prognosis be for Joe's ability to maintain top-level service both in the Boston office and for his colleagues in the West?
Â
My feeling is the prognosis is poor. Sooner or later Joe will make a mistake and will have to pay for it. He is acting out of the fear of being left out of the loop in conjunction with an imposed expectation that he will answer these coast-to-coast calls.
My suggestion would be for him and his manager to draw some time maps. I suggest that he create an image that tangibly highlights the optimum overlaps of time that will ensure that the needs of the West Coast office can be met without requiring Joe to stay awake until midnight. This approach requires compromise, but more importantly, it will help influence and guide the actions of the West Coast team, to know that, with the exception of true emergencies, a distinct envelope of time exists for live communication.
Such a technique might not please everybody fully, and that's where a lot of the fear comes in. But what it will do is to draw up an accepted and understood plan of operations. This will help dissolve the fear of the loop and replace it with clearer, more productive thought.
The Achilles Heel of the U.S. Dream Team
The fear of being out of the loop, and the resultant desire to answer emails and other surface-level messages at any time of day or night puts the vast productivity potential of the North American workforce at a profound disadvantage precisely at the point in world history when it needs depth and creativity more than ever.
How to Prevent Superficial Attitudes from Creeping into the Workplace Culture
⢠First, recognize that such a danger exists. Recognize that speed generates a greater potential for complacency and error.
⢠Take a page from the world of project management in which all actions require closure: Allow time to review key activities, to perform post-mortems or debriefs before moving ahead. Track both positive and negative developments as they happen.
⢠Practice Management by Walking Around (MBWA) and empower others to do the same. No one knows better the advantages and disadvantages of a system (or its replacement) than the people on the front line.
⢠Quantify the current culture of fear in your workplace. What are you afraid of? What are other people afraid of? What is being done to make these fears tangible so that they may be confronted?
⢠Allow time to review what competitors and the marketplace are doing. Check with mentors. Observe and communicate new pest practices.
⢠Remember the old phrase: There is only one way that a person (or company) can coast, and that is downhill.
To illustrate this, observe Thomas Freidman's analysis of the U.S. Basketball “Dream Team” of the 2004 Olympic Games from his book,
The World Is Flat
.
2
This was the team that was trumpeted as the Goliath of the Games. It consisted of physically huge, talented, and experienced players from what was supposed to be the best, most powerful, and certainly the richest basketball league in the world, the NBA. Yet they were trounced by countries such as Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina. Their defeats were made more humiliating by the players' international celebrity. It was a fiasco.
What went wrong? Freidman argues that the attitude of the NBA had changed over time from a team sport in which players drilled on team plays, which included strategy, planning, and a certain degree of anonymity, to one in which the sole important factor was the individual's way-cool lay-up or the nothing-but-net dunk. In other words, they went for the basketball equivalent of the sound bite or photo-op: fast, intense, and impressive, but lacking the substance of a winning strategy.
If corporations, Freidman says, could remember failures of this nature, in which the strategy for victory ends up being based on the superficial and in which the energies of players end up being used for short-term turnaround of strategically insignificant components, then they might be able to foresee and avoid their own demise. This, I believe, applies to people like Joe and to the people who employ him as well as to all the companies and individuals who believe their own star status when it comes to staying in the loop. By assigning Joe the responsibility of taking all calls, his employers opted for a superficial solution: one that seems to solve the problem, but instead sets the stage for error and failure, which might still take management by surprise. Whether due to fatigue, overload, or error, more and more companies are going to start losing more and more games to upstart teams from lesser-known countries. That's a big price to pay.
Next on people's big list of fears is that of simply saying no, whether to the boss, to a client, or to a colleague. This fear predates the advent of high-speed technology, of course, but it has certainly been compounded in an age where it is not only quicker and easier to avoid having to negotiate, but one in which people have lost the ability and the know-how to do just that. It's a lot easier to simply say, “Put it on my desk; I'll get to it when I can,” or “Send me an email on that.”