Be Here Now

Imagine this scene. You’re deep in a conversation with a colleague in his office. You’re both totally focused on dealing with an issue, when suddenly someone barges in and interrupts, demanding your immediate attention.

Do you engage the interrupter, ignoring the person you were previously talking to? Of course not. That would be considered rude. In fact, most civilized people do not interrupt in that manner, unless it is to convey some urgent news, like there’s a bomb threat and you have to evacuate the building.

So why do we allow incoming emails on our BlackBerrys and iPhones interrupt what we are doing in the moment, particularly when that moment involves other people?

I remember a client meeting I once attended involving key personnel for the business unit’s monthly update. Participants represented all aspects of the operation.

The national sales manager walked in carrying his over-flowing in-box and placed a wastebasket next to his chair before sitting. He then proceeded to go through the entire in-box, disposing of this document or that, penciling notes on another, and so on throughout the meeting.

I was appalled by his rudeness, and further by the fact that the man running the meeting – his boss – allowed it to continue. But isn’t that the equivalent of people in a meeting, reading and sending emails on their PDAs? In my mind, there is no difference. The PDA is just more subtle than a hulking in-box.

Similarly, what do you make of a boss who postpones discussion of an urgent topic with you until he next sees you. And then, when you finally get to see him, he spends the entire meeting staring at his BlackBerry, scanning a series of messages and answering some of them? Is he more focused on you and the issue at hand, or the extraneous email that pops up on his BlackBerry? Will his response fully reflect the information you've given him? Not likely.

The title of this entry is borrowed from the 1971 book by the same name, Be Here Now, by Baba Ram Dass, née Richard Alpert, about his experience in Eastern religions and his discovery of the importance of being present in the moment. It’s a core truth not just for those seeking spiritual enlightenment but in business as well. It is the imperative of being here now, being present in the moment for yourself and, more importantly, for the people you work with.

If organizational communications are to be effective, everyone must engage completely, not half-way. Persistent use of PDAs when you should be engaging other people is, in my mind, half-way – perhaps less.

Some people brag about their ability to “multi-task.” I push back. You may think you’re able to do two or three things at once, but you are not doing them as well as you might if you were focused on just one of them. These same people insist that they can follow the thread of the meeting while on their BlackBerry. I doubt it. While they may glean the gist of what’s being said, they will miss the nuance and subtlety of the discussion.

And that’s to say nothing about the disrespect they show their colleagues as their attention focuses elsewhere.

The core subject of this blog is communications and how we can become better communicators, and use communications to be more effective businesspeople.

It is a continuing frustration for me as a communications consultant to have to deal with this on-going rudeness, not so much for the fact that I feel it is a sign of disrespect as it is an indication of someone’s inability to focus, to Be Here Now in the moment with me and other colleagues and fully participate in the issues at hand, engaging us and the topic completely.

A manager’s inability or lack of desire to control use of PDAs in meetings is a manager that likely has other issues impeding communications and, therefore, his/her ability to operate effectively as a manager.

I raise the issue because of a story earlier this week in the New York Times titled “Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners” about the ubiquity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and the like in our modern business world and people’s propensity to focus on them at all times.

The article (thankfully) notes, “A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.”

I side with the traditionalists. As this article adds, increasingly organizations and managers are demanding a “BlackBerrys off” policy for their meetings. Ford CEO Allan Mulally orders his direct reports to turn off their BlackBerrys for his weekly team meeting. And I'm sure he's not alone in that edict.

I heartily endorse that approach, counsel my clients similarly, and hope it will spread with the same speed as did the No Smoking in meetings policy in the 1980s and 90s.

Just as cigarette smoke once polluted the atmosphere of business meetings, so too do PDAs now. Perhaps we can hope for the day when the use of BlackBerrys in meetings will go the way of smoking in meetings so that we can all Be Here Now.