Communication Blockers — Not Being Fully Present
When you’re not there even when you’re there.
There are several communication blockers that may spoil our team meetings. They often attack in doles which makes them more powerful and disruptive. The most common are:
• Not being there
• Dishonesty
• Passivity
• Being “over”
WHEN I BEING “NOT THERE”?
• You’re not there when you multitask.
Yes, there is an endless stream of messages attacking you via chat or email and you feel the need to reply instantly to all of them. What should one do depends on what is their role and what priority the incoming message has. Sometimes you’d have to handle incoming work right away. If you realize, though, that the meeting you are in should be more important than other stuff, you could signalize to the rest of the team, that you can’t reply by setting up the status on our chat or even leaving a notification on the email to inform others that you won’t be available to answer until the meeting finishes. It may be a good idea to turn off the communicators for the meeting duration.
• You are “not there” when you’re somewhere else.
It may happen that you have really complicated or urgent stuff on you. Even though you try to participate in something else this stuff keeps occupying our full brain capacity. If it’s more important than the meeting we’re in, accept that and just excuse ourselves from the meeting. Agree with the meeting participants on how would you make it up to them and how will we follow up on the agreement that was taken without you. If your input will be needed during the meeting you may just honestly explain why you have trouble today to be fully present and agree that you will engage in the meeting only in those moments when you will be called out by the name for answer.
• You’re not present if you are not listening to what other people say.
Listening is much harder than one may think, especially while working online. We don’t usually have a cat trying to lay down on our keyboard, kids shouting at each other, or neighbors drilling when we work from the office. It’s our everyday distraction at home.
— You don’t listen when you’re being distracted. — But you may not listen as well when you think you’re focused…
— You don’t listen when you think about how to respond. — It’s our brain’s blind spot when we try to formulate the answer while other people continue their stories.
If we want to be a more kind speakers, we could try to formulate our opinion concisely and use pauses between points to allow the information to sink in.
The art of listening is harder than speaking up. I read the best book on communication last year. Follow me on Medium I promise to dig up the learnings about how to be a better listener and create a post about it.
#knowledgebites on how to be more present during the online meeting
- Before the meeting starts create a TODO list and write down all your opened tasks and thoughts that bug your mind. Thanks to that you may free some of your brain capacity, that otherwise would be focused on other pending tasks.
• Sygnalize to the rest of the world you won’t be able to reply until the meeting ends
• Best if you could turn off other communication channels (chats, phones, email)
• Turn on the camera — when you know people can see your reactions you are more engaged. One simply doesn’t want to be caught not listening.
• Take notes it helps most of us to focus on what is being said
• Ask questions and participate
• Listen actively
This article was firstly published on my blog teambooster
