Communication blockers – Not being present

There are several things that may cause a disruption during our team meetings. We can call them “communication blockers” and they may attack in doles which makes them more powerful and disruptive. The most common are:

Not being there
Dishonesty
Passivity
Being “over”

When I'm not there?

  • You’re not there 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, or kids shouting at each other, or neighbours playing their new drill when 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 what to respond. – It’s our brain’s blind spot when we try to formulate the answer while other people continue their story.

If we want to be a more kind speaker, we could try to formulate our opinion concisely and use pauses between points to allow the information to sink in.

  • You’re not there when you multitasking.

Yes, there is an endless stream of messages attacking us via chat or email and we need to reply instantly to all of them. What should one do depends on what is their role and what priority do the incoming messages have. Sometimes we’d have to handle them right away. If we know, though, that the meeting we are in should be more important to us than other stuff, we could signalize to the rest of the team, that we can’t reply by setting up the status on our chat or even leave a notification on the email to inform others that we 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.

  •  Your not there when you’re somewhere else.

It may happen we have really complicated or urgent stuff on us. Even though we 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 we make it up to them and how will we follow up on the agreement that was taken without us. If our input will be needed during the meeting we may just honestly explain why we have trouble today to be fully present and agree that we will engage in the meeting only in those moments when we will be called out by the name for answer.