Stop Being Everyone’s Go-To! 4 Ways to Curb All the Interruptions

Interruptions probably derail you daily.

It’s this bad: Leaders can face an average of four interruptions from their staff every hour of every workday, a researcher at the University of California-Irvine found. That’s not even counting the number of interruptions from text, social media calls, and mindless personal distractions!

“A lot of people feel that they want to go above and beyond what they ordinarily do to be able to signal to colleagues that they’re working hard,” says the researcher, Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span.

So, good leaders like you in Finance take the interruption, offer to help and get back to your work when you can.

But that’s not the way to get things done.

Why All the Interruptions?

Why do employees interrupt their bosses so much? Many times, they don’t want to or aren’t equipped to solve their own problems. Often, the boss thinks it’s easier to just do it, rather than take the time to teach them to do it.

But the key really is to get employees to solve their own problems. That way, everyone can do their jobs better.

Here are four strategies that will help:

1. Don’t Be So Smart

Leaders often work on autopilot, listening to what comes at them and handling it. So when an employee comes in and asks a question, they answer it and get back to work. (But not all that quickly. Mark found in one study that when people are interrupted, they almost always get back to the task the same day, but it takes about 20 minutes, and they pick up two other tasks in the meantime.)

So when you take the interruption and answer the question or fix the problem, employees start working on autopilot: They don’t gain the experience and knowledge that will help them solve their problems today, tomorrow or next year.

You can stop enabling this cycle with one question of your own: “What would you do in this situation?”

2. Help Them Distinguish

Some issues need the boss’s immediate attention, for instance, fiscal violations or harassment reports.

But more often, managers don’t need to get involved right away or ever.

Helping employees distinguish between what needs to come to the boss’s attention and what doesn’t will curb unnecessary interruptions.

One way is to ask yourself, “Is this something that must be solved right now?” Then encourage them to start asking themselves that before they even come to you.

3. Point Them in Another Direction

Finance leaders know almost all the answers because they’re seasoned and learned along the way where to get the information and how to use it properly.

But there’s a time you actually need to withhold valuable information.

Push employees in the right direction to answer their questions on policies, processes or problem-solving. If it’s available via a company resource, managers can point them toward a channel in the internal app, an online handbook, procedure guide, policy guideline, etc.

Employees will remember information they uncover and retain more information when they read or view it as opposed to when it’s just spoken to them.

4. Create a Culture of Solutions

Some issues will always require your involvement, but most of those only need your help, not for you to take full responsibility.

You can start building a culture of employee-created solutions by requiring staff to bring at least two potential solutions to them with every issue they believe requires the boss’s attention.

That can curb interruptions immediately as employees start identifying and implementing solutions without involving their bosses.

For the issues that still come up, leaders want to help employees implement one of their possible solutions when appropriate.

That will build their confidence to resolve more on their own down the road.