by Kevin Kruse
Without hesitation he answered, “Oh yeah, I already have Snapstreaks going with a bunch of them.”
SMARTPHONES CONTRIBUTE TO ACCIDENTS AND FATALITIES
You’re on your back being wheeled into the operating room. It’s cold, bright, the doctors and nurses scurry around in their scrubs. The anesthesiologist stands by your side and says, “Okay, you’re going to go to sleep now.” As you begin to drift off the doctor says one more thing. Don’t worry about anything. I’ll be right here…making three phone calls, sending thirteen text messages, and I’m going to check the internet thirty-six times.
Crazy? That’s the phone activity of an anesthesiologist during a procedure to fix a sixty-one-year-old woman’s defective heart valve. Normally a routine procedure, the patient died on the operating table (Inside Edition 2015). The malpractice lawsuit is ongoing.
The case seems shocking, but “distracted doctoring” is more common than you would think. The patient of a neurosurgeon who made ten personal phone calls while conducting brain surgery ended up paralyzed and the lawsuit was settled out of court. Over half of heart monitor technicians admit to making personal calls or sending text messages during surgeries and 40 percent of them even admit that it’s unsafe (Chow 2011). Yes, smartphones enable health care professionals to access patient records, call for advice, look up prescribing information. But they can also distract and lead to medical errors.
For most of us, the distraction caused by our smartphone just means mistakes on paperwork and a loss of productivity. But in many industries, mobile phone distraction can lead to bodily harm or even death.
SMARTPHONE SURVEILLANCE IMPEDES CANDOR
As a young boy I had a hardcover book that covered the history of espionage, from World War II spies to U-2 pilot Gary Powers. I loved that book. My favorite chapter was all about the cloak-and-dagger technology. How cool would it be to have a secret microphone in a light bulb! How could I turn my shirt button into a camera?
Today, we are all potential spies. We walk around with highly sophisticated recording devices in plain sight. Touch the red circle, place the device in front of you on the conference room table—just like everyone else does—and leave the meeting with a recording of every word uttered in the room. Video isn’t much harder.
Want to really make sure you don’t get caught? Just go to the App Store and download an app that will record hundreds of hours of audio in the background—no lights, no sounds, no squiggly lines on the screen—so if anyone does look at your phone they would have no way of knowing. What does this “top secret” audio recorder cost? Ninety-nine cents.
And if you think it doesn’t happen in your workplace, read the recent headlines that cover media moguls, members of Congress, Radio City Music Hall dancers, locker rooms, Silicon Valley CEOs, and an endless number of teachers:
“Ex-Fox Anchor Gretchen Carlson Secretly Recorded Meetings with Roger Ailes, Caught ‘Numerous Incidents’ of Harassment on Tape” (Gregorian 2016)
“Secret Recording of Republicans’ Closed-Door Meeting Reveals Fears About Repealing Obamacare” (Lange 2017)
“Rockettes Management Blasts ‘Deceitful and Cowardly’ Dancer for Secretly Recording Team Meeting” (Flood 2017)
“Listen Up, Coaches: Watch Out for Hidden Recording Devices” (Sondheimer 2017)
“In Video, Uber CEO Argues with Driver Over Falling Fares” (Newcomer 2017)
“Students Secretly Taping Angry Teachers” (Fox News 2007)
Now in the cases of these headlines—when most things hit the press—it’s because a boss, coach, teacher, or other person of power is doing something illegal, unethical, or just plain dumb and embarrassing. That’s not the point. I’m not worried about smartphones catching you doing something you shouldn’t be doing. I’m not trying to protect union-busting executives or whistle-blowers who film the abuse of animals in R&D labs.
I am worried about open and honest communication in our daily work experience. I’m worried about self-censorship in matters where the fear is unfounded. Will people freely share crazy ideas in the spirit of brainstorming if they fear someone in the room might release audio clips in the future?
Matt Kincaid is an executive, a business professor at Heritage University, and the author of Permission to Speak Freely: How the Best Leaders Cultivate a Culture of Candor. He told me in an interview conducted for The LEADx Leadership Show:
Research shows, as we take higher leadership roles, that actually people are less honest with us, less direct with us. We just don’t get the candid things we need…people are hesitant to ask questions. They’re hesitant to share their uncertainties. They’re hesitant to offer up their own ideas.
Things would be a lot easier and a lot better if there was no such idea as saying things the right way, because what that requires people to do is then run their authentic feelings and thoughts through a filter, we call it Verbal Photoshop (Kincaid 2017).
“Verbal Photoshop.” Love that term.
Discrimination, abuse, bullying, and harassment should never be tolerated. Bad guys should be taken down with the help of secret recordings. But in this hypercompetitive dynamic world we live in, as leaders we need our teams communicating quickly and authentically, taking risks, and sometimes, yes, speaking with emotional honesty.
ARE SMARTPHONES REALLY A LEADERSHIP PROBLEM?
Do you care about productivity?
Do you care about the stress levels—the health—of your team members?
Do you care about the safety of your team members?
Do you care about a culture of candor, creativity, and fostering innovation?
If you care about any of these things, then smartphone use at work is a leadership issue.
IT’S TIME TO PUT YOUR SMARTPHONE AWAY
As a leader, your actions speak louder than your words. Your behavior influences the behavior of others. This chapter opened with survey data suggesting we shouldn’t bring phones into meetings of any kind, because even just looking at messages is perceived by many to be rude. We now know that the constant interruptions of new emails and text messages and calls are hurting our productivity and the quality of our work. Even if our phones are muted nearby, we suffer “brain drain” because we have to focus on not responding to them.
Here’s a radical idea: when you get to the office in the morning, mute your phone and put it in your desk drawer. (True, research would suggest that we need to leave it out in our car or give it to our assistant, but hey, I know that’s entirely too radical!) Give yourself permission to check it three times a day, but after checking it and responding to any new messages, put it back in your desk.
But what if my spouse has an emergency and needs to reach me? It is amazing that somehow we survived for centuries without our family members being able to communicate in any given second. But regardless, maybe your spouse can call you on your regular office phone, or the landline phone of your assistant, the office receptionist, or your buddy at work?
But what if I use my phone to take notes and access the calendar during meetings? Discover the wonderful old-fashioned highly tactile world of quality pens and leather-bound notebooks. You’ll look sophisticated and research shows handwriting notes is better for both comprehension and recall (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). Later, type your notes into Evernote or whatever electronic system you use, or just snap a picture of your notepages at the end of the day and save them in your favorite note-keeping app. Keep a paper printout of your day calendar and monthly calendar in the back of your notebook to reference during the day.
But I’m in sales; don’t I have to respond immediately if a client calls? I’ve had clients all my life and I, too, used to drop everything to pick up a client’s call on the second ring. Eventually I realized they were hiring me for many different reasons, adding
up to my total value proposition, and not so much because I pick up their phone calls the fastest. I now onboard new clients with a simple message: I love you and pride myself on great customer service, and I try to be superproductive on behalf of you and my other clients. To that end I check for emails and calls three times a day so I’ll never be out of touch more than a few hours. It’s always best to schedule meetings and calls in advance of course, but if they ever really need to reach me, they can call my assistant who will track me down.
SMARTPHONES, SAFETY, AND SULLY SULLENBERGER
For the one-hundredth episode of The LEADx Leadership Show I was honored to have as my guest Captain “Sully” Sullenberger. I ended the interview with the same last question I ask all my guests. “Help us to become a little bit better,” I said. “Give us a challenge. What is something specific you want us to do?”
Would the man who successfully landed US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River—thus saving 155 lives—remind us to always keep our seat belts on when flying, or to really know where the closest exit is? Recently he’s been fighting against the efforts of some in Congress to privatize the air traffic control system. He has called airline lobbyists “rats in dark corners.” Maybe Sully will challenge us to call our members of Congress to protect airline safety.
Or will it be something about self-driving cars? Sully is the only independent member of the US Department of Transportation’s Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation. While he supports technology for driver assistance, he’s against removing the driver from the controls completely.
But Captain Sully’s challenge wasn’t related to any of those things. In fact, he insisted on giving us two challenges, and both were related to our use of mobile phones. First, he advocated that we break our Pavlovian reaction to text messages and new emails in order to think more deeply and to build up our “creative reserves.” He said:
If we as leaders and team members set aside some period of time every day, perhaps half an hour or an hour, to free ourselves of distractions, to open our minds, to maybe even go outside for a run during lunch and not just react to whatever is immediately in front of us from email to a text, we have the ability to tap creative reserve…we can sometimes come up with the insights, the framing of a question in such a way that we come up with a solution we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise (Sullenberger 2017).
His second challenge had to do with texting while driving:
Right now, for the first time in decades, traffic deaths are on the increase. I’m convinced it’s largely due to distractions from personal electronic devices while we’re driving. The single most effective thing that each of us could do right now, today, to stop that trend is to turn off, to mute, to put away our phones when we drive. And do what we did ten or fifteen years ago, wait until we get there to find out what’s going on. Put our own needs aside, delay our gratification, delay responding to our need for curiosity for a few minutes, and that little gift of civic virtue would save thousands of lives in this country alone every year. We don’t have the right to put others at unnecessary risk for our own convenience.
As leaders, for reasons of safety and reasons of problem solving, Captain Sully Sullenberger is asking for you to put that phone away.
THE TAKEAWAY
The combination of the internet and smartphones provides us with an unprecedented connection to information, entertainment, colleagues, family, and friends. The ubiquity of smartphones—and the never-ending stream of new message notifications—now leads to chronic distraction, which impairs productivity and can jeopardize safety. Leaders should model the way by silencing their phones and keeping them out of sight.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: Set the example for team members by not carrying your phone wherever you go. When you are meeting with someone, practice active listening and don’t try to multitask with your phone. Display a NO SMARTPHONES sign in the conference rooms and encourage people to stay focused and productive throughout the day.
SALES PROFESSIONAL: Even if you legitimately need your phone for client calls more than most knowledge workers, try to “train” your clients to communicate in a way that will minimize your disruptions and maximize your productivity. If you call them to check in midweek, they’ll be less likely to call you. If you schedule your phone calls with them ahead of time, they’ll begin to mirror the practice back when they want to call you.
SPORTS COACH: As a coach you have considerable authority over your players. Just let them know that whether they are on the bench during a game or in the locker room afterward, you expect everyone to be phone-free and focused on learning.
MILITARY OFFICER: Smartphones have many benefits in the military just as they do in the private sector, but of course they come with added intelligence and operational security risks. Those are generally understood. The ongoing challenges are back on base: the dangers from texting and driving, work-life balance issues from never-ending messages. When deployed in combat, be mindful of and proactively handle casualty notification knowing that the ubiquity of smartphones gives you little control over information flow.
PARENT: I will admit that I occasionally glance at my phone when stopped at a red light, but I never check the phone when my kids are in the car. First, because I don’t want to crash and hurt them and second because I know they’re going to be driving soon and if I use my phone in the car, they’ll think it’s okay for them to do the same. No phones at the dinner table is another easy rule that will enhance communication and family bonding. Another powerful practice, hard to adopt, is to just not use your mobile devices at all when your children are around. Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair asked over one thousand children between the ages of four and eighteen about their parents’ mobile phones. The dominant response was some form of anger, sadness, or loneliness, and other studies show a correlation between parental phone use and children acting out for attention. We’ll have plenty of time to scroll through Facebook when our kids have moved out of the house; it will happen faster than we realize.
INDIVIDUAL: The single easiest, most life-changing thing you can do right now is to shut off all notifications on your phone. Instead of responding to every beep and vibration, like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell, you will look at your phone when you want to. Now for most, that’s still going to be way too often. I personally challenge you to a digital detox. Scared? You can always go slowly. Put your phone in another room tonight when you sit down for dinner. Leave your phone in your car for two hours as you watch your daughter’s soccer game. Don’t check work messages after 9:00 p.m. Never check it in the presence of your children. Soon you’ll be ready to detox for an entire weekend.
3
HAVE NO RULES
I’m staring at my expense check and it’s short by about four dollars. Must have totaled it up wrong when I submitted my expense report.
I pull up the original form with a month’s worth of mileage, meals, hotel rooms, and office supplies. I add up all the rows again and it seems correct.
This was the first time I had ever done my expenses and gotten a check back. I sold my business just a month before and was now a vice president and partner in the new company that acquired mine. Maybe I filled out the form wrong or don’t understand how the expense stuff works. I shoot an email off to our chief financial officer letting him know that my check didn’t match my submission; I didn’t care about the four dollars but wanted to make sure I hadn’t made an error somewhere.
The email I got back from the CFO—the person who was a fellow partner in the firm, the person who had just cut me a check for over a million dollars to buy my little company—said, “I deducted $4.34 because we don’t allow employees to buy Post-it notes.”
What? He actually reviewed my office supplies receipt and deducted the Post-it notes? And what the heck could be wrong with Post-it notes? I emailed back: Why?
; And he answered: Wasteful expense. Cheaper to tear regular paper into little squares.
I can still remember how I felt although this was over fifteen years ago. Let’s just say I sure didn’t feel vice presidential or like a co-owner of the company. I mean, I didn’t even have the authority to choose office supplies.
I wasn’t the only one surprised by the expense reimbursement rules. Another executive, whose company had also recently been acquired, found his expense check short by five dollars because he had ordered a beer along with his dinner while he was traveling for business. He learned, after the fact, that the company policy was not to reimburse for alcohol. You could buy a five-dollar milkshake with your dinner but not a five-dollar beer.
What I had stumbled into would quickly become known as the “Post-it note debate.” It wasn’t about little self-sticking pieces of paper, of course. And it wasn’t about beer. It was about rules.
While the partnership would eventually review and rewrite our internal policies (more on this below), very quickly the senior leadership divided into two camps. We of course thought they were “those out-of-touch micromanagers in HQ” and they thought of us as “those wasteful spendthrifts who don’t care about the bottom line.”
BAD RULES START WITH THE BEST OF INTENTIONS
All of us can rattle off countless “dumb rules” we’ve encountered in the workplace. But nobody creates rules that are dumb on purpose. Whoever created the rule must certainly believe they are doing so for the benefit of the organization. So where do all the rules come from?
