THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL
Rushing creates anxiety and resentment among co-workers
By
SUE SHELLENBARGER
Updated Dec. 10, 2013 11:11 p.m. ET
More workers are tapping a new career tool: looking rushed.
Sure, it makes you look busy, but can it also lead to burnout? Sue
Shellenbarger and recovering rusher Sunita Badola discuss on Lunch Break.
Photo: Getty Images.
Every office has (at least) one—the colleague who is always
walking fast, finishing other people's sentences and racing from meeting to
meeting while fielding email, texts and voice mail on multiple devices. That
person can appear very important.
They may not know it, but they're usually causing secondhand
stress.
Rushing blocks thoughtful communication and creates worries
among colleagues that "maybe I should be doing that, too, or maybe my
stuff isn't as important as his, or maybe he'll be irritable if I
interrupt," says Jordan Friedman, a New York City stress-management
speaker and trainer.
'So Sorry to Interrupt...' To grab a minute of the chronic
rusher's time, some colleagues resort to chasing them to the restroom or
parking lot. Peter Hoey
Work & Family Mailbox
Ray Hollinger was known for years among colleagues in a
previous job as a sales-training executive as "Mr. Busy," he says. In
his quest to be a top performer, he says, he often thought, "If all this
stuff just keeps coming at me, I will take it on. I will take it all on,"
says Mr. Hollinger, founder of More Time More Sales, a Phoenixville, Pa.,
training firm.
He says he wasn't aware that his constant motion sometimes
made others feel uncomfortable—until a co-worker pointed it out. She told him
that when she tried to talk with him, " 'your volume goes up, your pace of
speaking goes up, and you're not fully in the conversation,' " he says.
Working a few years ago with Rosemary Tator, a Waltham,
Mass., leadership-development coach, Mr. Hollinger stopped piling on projects
and started blocking out on his calendar the time he needed to achieve
realistic goals—including time for interruptions. He also now stops himself
when he talks too fast, by "taking a couple of breaths, and lowering my
volume and my pace," he says.
Ms. Tator invites rushers to visualize themselves on video.
"What would you think of that person who ran into every meeting late,
spent half the time on their cellphone with their email, and had to ask, 'Could
you please repeat that?' because they weren't listening?" says Ms. Tator,
principal partner in 2beffective, a coaching and consulting firm.
Peter Hoey
Seeing colleagues—especially managers—operate at a frenzied,
frantic pace can make the behavior contagious, says Robert S. Rubin, an
associate professor of management at DePaul University, Chicago. He advises
managers to hold "inoculation discussions, to inoculate the employee from
catching the feeling" that rushing around is necessary to being seen as a
good performer.
Open-plan offices help spread the contagion. When the boss
has a view of the entire office, "no one wants to be seen as the slowest
moving object in the solar system. You have to keep up with the
Joneses—literally," says Ben Jacobson, co-founder of Conifer Research,
Chicago, which conducts behavioral and cultural research for companies.
Architects have begun blurring human figures in drawings of
new-office projects, to appeal to clients who aspire to active, high-energy
workplaces, says Jorge Barrero, a technical designer in Chicago for Gensler, an
architecture, planning and design firm. The image is one clients "can
connect with on an emotional level," Mr. Barrero says.
Tom Krizmanic, a principal with Studios Architecture in New
York, says about a quarter of the 218 designs he helped judge in a recent
office-design competition, co-sponsored by Business Interiors by Staples,
showed humans as blurred figures in motion. The trend began about three years
ago, he says.
Some people go into overdrive after getting promoted or
taking a challenging new job. Surrounded by senior managers, "they're not
the smartest person in the room any more," says William Arruda of New York
City, a personal-branding consultant. Instead of prioritizing their lengthening
to-do lists, "they go into hair-on-fire mode, telling themselves, 'I'm a
machine. I get so much done. There's nothing you can give me that will break
me.' "
"The productivity of entire teams can go down,"
Mr. Arruda says. "If you have one person rushing into meetings at the last
minute and tapping a pencil through the entire session, it changes the cadence
for the entire group."
To jolt rushers into awareness, he has them ask for written
feedback from 10 to 20 colleagues. The form includes such seemingly frivolous
questions as, "If I were a household appliance, which one would I
be?" Chronic rushers are shocked when co-workers liken them to "a
blender whirring around at 9 million miles an hour," he says.
Executive coach Joel Garfinkle says racing around became a
habit for one financial executive he worked with. In the process, he treated
other people as a hindrance, pressuring and snapping at them, says Mr.
Garfinkle, of Oakland, Calif. Subordinates saw him as arrogant and insensitive,
hurting performance and morale.
Mr. Garfinkle's advice to the executive: "You need to
leave a smaller wake."
A calm, unruffled work style is still a mark of competency,
management experts say. "Executives who have figured it out… are poised
and strategic. That's a big difference from reacting all day" to others'
demands, says Susan Hodgkinson, a principal with the Personal Brand Co., a
Boston-based leadership-development and executive-coaching firm.
It is an approach that signals to colleagues that they can
slow down and set priorities too.
When Sunita Badola accelerated her pace to meet growing
responsibilities, she says priority-setting was a big challenge. "If
somebody approached me with a project and said it was urgent, I would just
treat it as urgent," says Ms. Badola, a senior manager at Takeda
Pharmaceutical Co., in Cambridge, Mass.
Her style spilled over to her direct reports, making them
feel "super-reactive" and "really busy" too, says Russell
Walker, a scientist who works on Ms. Badola's team.
Her manager, Elena Izmailova, suggested Ms. Badola get
coaching, a benefit provided by Takeda, to help her "understand the big
picture and not get caught up too much in day-to-day details," says Dr.
Izmailova, director of translational medicine for Takeda. Working with
executive coach Beth Benatti Kennedy of Beverly, Mass., Ms. Badola says she
learned to limit her daily task list, block out email distractions and push
back when colleagues pressed her to hurry on a project, asking questions so she
could set priorities herself.
Now, Ms. Badola pulls back the lens and presents the bigger
picture to her team, Mr. Walker says. It is an approach that "allows
everyone to be a little more comfortable and at ease, because we're focusing on
the longer-term goal a couple of months from now—rather than what needs to be
done by five o'clock today," he says.
And with a little more leeway in her schedule, Ms. Badola
says, she finds a new way to relate to her five employees: She hosts quarterly
lunches, to "talk about fun stuff and get to know one another."
Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com
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