Daniel Goleman has written a great new book:Focus.
I was particularly taken by his section on social sensitivity. According to the studies he quotes, your attention to social signals drops the higher up you are in the social or corporate hierarchy. The higher-up tended to interrupt, ignore, or not pay attention to non verbal clues of lower status individuals. The lower the status, the more attention was paid to non verbal cues and the more deference to other speakers.
Now, this doesn’t apply to everyone. If you tend to speak slowly, analyze carefully, take time to answer…you might not struggle with cutting people off. Most leaders interrupt. They tend to have so many balls in the air, with not enough hours in the day, such that impatience is a 24 hour a day companion.
As we love to say in Vistage “who you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you are saying”. You can’t pay enough attention to the impact of this messaging. Be aware of what people aren’t saying to you that they get, and assume that you get, but you totally missed. Or, you cut them off and they lose that little thought which was the most important part of the message.
How many times did you interrupt someone today because you already thought you knew the answer, or you didn’t have time to wait for it? How do you counteract that tendency?
How ’bout letting the other person finish their thought, pausing to absorb what they just said and then asking, …is there anything else?