With so much vying for our attention today, success often rests on the ability to ignore. I’m not just talking about the endless “scam likely” calls and telemarketing e-mails, text messages, and push notifications we forgot we signed up for. I’m also talking about the people from our past professional lives with nothing productive to contribute to the current time, who reach out via LinkedIn or another social media vehicle. Learning how and when to ignore also can be used to great effect in keeping employees’ minds on their company’s goals rather than being distracted by marketplace competitors.
Ignoring vs. Blocking
I recently woke up to a LinkedIn push notification that said, “So-and-so invites you to take a look.” Instead of following the directive to “take a look,” I clicked to ignore the invitation. I’m confident this was an invitation to become angered by improvements I had asked for a year ago that finally were being implemented on a Website I used to manage. The person who sent the invitation to “take a look,” had blocked all such improvements while I was an employee under her. The message appeared a couple days after I also chose to ignore a birthday well-wishing post from this same person on Facebook and never responded to a message she sent shortly after I left the company wishing me “the very best.” I could block this person on all social media outlets, and even from contacting me via phone or e-mail, but there is much more psychological power in simply ignoring.
When you block a person, they can hold that action up as negative evidence of your character and can portray themselves as the victim: “Well, I tried to be gracious and reach out, but she blocked me!” Ignoring messages leaves the toxic person with nothing. Muting posts or marking a contact’s posts as “low interest” is the better approach to take.
Focus on Personal Goals and the Good of the Company
The lessons learned managing unproductive, negative-impact people in one’s life can be applied to managing the distractions that can take an employee’s focus away from achieving their organization’s goals.
There’s a fine line between being aware of what a competitor is doing and becoming distracted by it. You don’t want an employee who is spending so much time scrutinizing and worrying over the competition that they unable to be truly innovative and create differentiating products and services. An employee who can’t tune out the information and imagery from the competition is likely to produce reflections of the competitor’s products rather than original ideas that take the narrative back from the competitor.
It’s also important for an employee to be able to tune out what their own colleagues are doing. You don’t want employees who simply mirror the work of their co-workers without thinking of new and better ways of doing things. You may want a new employee initially to learn from their more seasoned colleagues, but eventually you want to them to make the work their own and seek to do even better.
Development conversations with employees can encourage them to learn how to sometimes put metaphorical human horse blinders on when working on a project. They need to learn the skill of doing more than just responding to what others are doing.
Create a Future-Focused Team
When you learn the discipline in your own life of ignoring unproductive people, and thereby rendering them impotent to cause you harm, you also learn how to close out past professional chapters to focus on the next.
Rather than having employees who are continuously wringing their hands over completed work, you want a team that is thinking about what comes next. Whether it’s feedback from customers and professional contacts that continues past the point of usefulness or a person’s own repetitive thoughts, it’s important to psychologically click “ignore.”
Managers should be trained to understand when the post-mortems of a project have gone far enough and it’s time to stop the feedback loop and start asking “So, now what approach do you think would be best? Now that you have those lessons under your belt, what do you want to accomplish in your next project?”
How can you best train employees to identify what they should ignore and have the mental discipline to follow through?