The Market Outfit

Whatever else you are doing - STOP! - whenever you engage with someone in conversation. Ignore pagers. Put off interruptions. At the very least make sure that you ‘honour’ the space that you have when you are in any sort of one-to-one with someone else.

If you have ever been in conversation with someone who was being continually interrupted, how did you feel? I guess you felt pretty devalued by their lack of focus on you, what you were saying and the issues you were discussing. In the busy lives we lead it is so difficult not to get disturbed. Here are some incidences of what you might look out for and beneath, some ideas on how you can do it differently:-

- Letting the phone take priority - Having poor boundaries such that others disturb you whatever you would wish for - Letting your boss do this to you - Having an ‘always open door’ policy - Not apologising and getting back to people if it is that urgent you must be disturbed - Failing to keep appointments for one-to-ones - Being distracted (checking e-mails when on the phone is typical) - Talking too much - Raising your own issues rather than listening fully to others

There are more!

What you can do to resolve this:-

1. Set standards where interruptees know they must not interrupt you in such circumstances

2. Fully focus on the other person

3. Find times to talk when you are less likely to be disturbed

4. Don’t start a conversation when under time pressure and scoot off before completion (conversely, learn tactics to ‘escape’ when cornered by especially verbose individuals - just do it nicely!)

5. Close your door and mean it when you want focused one-to-one meetings

6. Have calls held when you are ‘people’ busy

7. Clear your desk and switch off computer screens

8. If senior management appear unexpectedly, give them feedback to avoid recurrence. Maintain commitments to your people.

9. Follow through on commitments you make

10. Show how you value people by acknowledging the contribution they make

11. Be consistent

The time invested in making people feel valued will make for great team spirit amongst your people and show yourself as a fine leader worthy of excellent followers!

The rewards will be immeasurable over time.

There seems to be a real problem with the up and coming generation with regard to proper email etiquette which is somewhat upsetting to the established professionalism expected in business. Much of this comes from the generation of instant messaging with small handheld devices like cell phone, PDAs and laptops. What is happening is that more and more slang is being introduced into business communications.

What is done by the fast paced communicators of the next up and coming generations is a skipping of proper and expected protocol, things such as not capitalizing “I” and using purposely misspelled shortened versions of every day words and phrases such as “by the way” just written “BTW” with a dash mark and then an additional sentence added on.

What we are finding is that the non-professionalism is looking like the communicator is disrespecting the receiver of the correspondence. Personally I often feel somewhat disrespected when contacted in this way from someone;

A.) I have never met;

B.) Is asking me to expend time to explain something to them, IE give them information;

C.) Wants to do business with me. It is quite hard to consider communications with horrendous spelling errors, impersonal slang, abbreviated words and lack of capitalization.

It almost appears to be purposefully disrespectful. And this is causing significant issues and making the up and coming next generation look uneducated, intellectually challenged and lacking of personal character or attention to detail. Something to think on, as maybe you have observed this scenario yourself to some degree; How does it make you feel?

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/