We’ve seen a lot of advice about office etiquette, productivity tips, and general best-practice suggestions, all concerning the intricacies of communication. Yes! Communication! The ability to say things in such a way that you get what you want from the people you’re bothering!

Frankly, we’re getting a little tired of it.

Communication might be a problem in business these days — lord knows, we’ve got hundreds of examples of emails that don’t make sense, or are so poorly written, we can’t even be sure that the person writing them was actually aiming for “sense” — but aren’t we going around this whole thing backwards? Maybe the problem is that people just don’t fucking listen.

“I’m Too Busy To Listen”
Middle management sucks, we know. You have underlings asking you to make decisions, upper-management dunning you for status reports, and nobody respects the work-life balance you always talk about, but never achieve. We sympathize, truly.

But, if someone comes up to talk to you, could you be a little less obvious about the fact that you’re not listening to them? For example: try not letting your eyes dart around as if you’re expecting to be ambushed by a gang of fountain-pen wielding accountants. More importantly, try to avoid repeating, “Yeah… yeah… yeah…” over and over while doing the pee-pee dance.

Keyworders
Another thing: We know when you’re just half-listening because you only seem to pick up on certain keywords, regardless of the context.

A: So, with tax season coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to get some 1040′s from the library and put them in the break room…

B: Taxes, talk to accounting, taxes, talk to accounting…

A: Also, I was going to order a meat lovers’ pizza for lunch, but I want them to withhold the ham.

B: Withholding, talk to accounting, withholding, talk to accounting.

Yeah, that’s helpful.

Skim Ilk
The email variation of the keyworder is, frankly, even worse. Because when someone takes the time and effort to construct an email so elegant, so communicative that it deserves a place in the office-work hall of fame, it kind of pisses them off to receive a vague, stock response based on only the first sentence of the message. Be especially careful when you respond by asking for more information, because if the stuff you’re asking for is already in the email you received, it’s just going to be confusing and embarrassing.

A Short Attention Span is Not a Business Skill
A lot of people think that they’re more skillful than they actually are. The folks that are most proud for the least reason are people who think that they are awesome at multi-tasking. Actually, no. What these people really are good at is losing focus.

Bobbling from one half-done task to another, doing badly at them all, and looking like a pill-ed-up speed-freak on the run from the government is no way to go through life, son. Especially because, thanks to the fact that you’ve come to think of yourself as the cheetah of the business world, you insist that any problem can be described, verbally, in twelve seconds; or in one short sentence, if you manage via email. Why should your co-workers be asked to make concessions to your self-induced attention deficit problems? It might be a useful exercise for the people you work with to have to explain complex business issues in such a simplified way that even a four year old could under stand it, but it shouldn’t be a day-to-day activity.

Wait. We know why. Because you’ve got the power in the relationship, and you certainly aren’t going to change. You might not even realize that there’s a need for you to change. Because you’re not listening.

You’ve got to believe you can do it!