Five techniques to handle interruptions in a conversation
Let me begin by asking a simple question: Do you easily get distracted when someone interrupts you during a professional or a personal conversation? I bet you do. Interruptions do the most damage when we allow their appearance to affect us long after we’ve returned to our initial task.
“What people perceive as an interruption varies systematically across different speakers and speech acts,” said Katherine Hilton, who is also a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. “Listeners’ own conversational styles influence whether they interpret simultaneous, overlapping talk as interruptive or cooperative. We all have different opinions about how a good conversation is supposed to go.”
Let’s see how can we help ourselves and the people around us overcome this problem at our workplaces and personal or social interactions:
1. Overcome Fear
We aren’t, contrary to what our mums may have told us, different from rest of the world. We all get distracted. We all lose our patience when a serious talk is interrupted. We all get annoyed when scheduled meetings don’t start as planned. If we allow fear to sneak into our minds at the prospect of distractions, we’ll cripple our productive abilities. This is dangerous. We must make an effort to overcome this fear.
Fearing distractions also fosters resentment against people who distract us. We must recognise that whether we like it or not, we will be distracted by some of our fresh over-ambitious employees and/or ill-mannered senior colleagues who don’t know the etiquettes of a professional or personal conversation. Sometimes we accept those distractions as opportunities as value-addition. We can’t stop distractions but we certainly can keep them from spoiling our day. Remember, this is our time!
2. Plan Out Interruptions
Always remember that effective planning is the cornerstone of a productive lifestyle. Plans are meant to get executed and the same goes for interruptions. Planning for interruptions might seem strange and sometimes impossible. Let’s be careful that by killing distractions completely may result in killing the innovation. Do you agree? The following easy visualization will help you get started:
Start each work session by drawing a few squares on a white board or a notebook placed in your office or in the meeting room. These represent distractions that will pop up. As you encounter and conquer distractions, put a checkmark in the appropriate box. After a while, you’ll be able to do this in your head. Sounds easy, right? An expected distraction has no power over your day. We still have control.
3. Park & Postpone
Once you’ve identified an interruption as something that needs attention and not just a nascent longing to goof off, try to detach or postpone your involvement. The brutal way would be to give a shut up to the person in front of his colleagues, which is impolite. The alternate would be to say: “Can we park this issue for now with your consent for another meeting”? but do take note of what is said.
The classy option is a bit more involved. Take a moment to understand what the distraction involves. Is a colleague critically injured at work? Is there a deadline you’ve missed out? Is there a business opportunity that needs immediate attention? If it turns out that you’re not facing an emergency, concentrate and pay attention of tens of man hours that are being spent in the meeting room and add some value.
4. Communicate
When it comes to managing people-based distractions, communication is the key. If i need to finish a project, I must let my people know in advance, be it at the office or in work form home regime, saying that I’ll stay unavailable until a certain time period. This is a reasonable and a decent way to communicate. People can plan their work accordingly too.
In this world of rapid communication, share your outlook or google calendar (or whatever apps you may use) with your teams at work. This way, the common understanding would prevail informing your teams members on your commitments and vice-versa.
5. Get to the Point
In turbulent times or otherwise, meetings are not convened merely for chit chat or for fun. In business everything has a cost attached to it. Make your meetings productive by sticking to the agenda with a firm start and end time enabling people to plan their day ahead.
Our “Get to the Point” style may not be appreciated by some of the senior people in the meeting rooms who love to give backstories before sharing anything. Interrupt professionally without any possible rudeness and ask for the main point anyway. Once you know the main point, you can ask for supporting information and make a smart decision about what to do before getting back to work.
Last Word
In some cases, our workplaces give us an impression like a chapter from The Hunger Games. Everyone is competing for 3Rs, Reward, Recognition, Resources, thus making efforts to keep their jobs. Practically, one has to collaborate with different personality types effectively to realise his/her own goals, and the unfortunate reality is that only a few of us are likely to be recognised. Some of the above steps will help us understand what interruptions and distractions are, how they ruin the purpose and meaning of our conversations and how to handle these.
Remember, if meeting chairs are interrupting, they have a purpose to do that. They can also postpone the interruption till a certain presentation or a discussion comes to an end. On the other hand, if the interrupter is a meeting participant, he/she can also hold back questions till Q&A session is opened. Most of our team members have capacity to learn quickly and managing interruptions is no big deal. With the passage of time, they all will understand how to attend and contribute to productive meetings and discussions and add value.
Related Articles:
‘Conversation’ — the key that unlocks just anything
5 Communication Mistakes We All Make
About the Author
Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan, Evolve HR thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.
