Distraction 1.) a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else.
2.) extreme agitation of the mind or emotion
In our high risk/ high consequence world, distraction is an operational hazard. Perhaps the most prevalent and under appreciated one, too. Distractions degrade our performance and invite all manner of human error.
Leaders in these environments cannot take a passive role in dealing with distraction. You have to deliberately attack noise, nonsense, and negativity, lest it hurt your team, a patient, or the organization. COVID was a great example of distraction. There was so much crap in between you and a patient that chances were that you were already operating at or beyond your cognitive capacity… and there was no end in sight. For some, the distraction sadly robbed them of their joy for the job. They were torched by the time it was all over.
So, distraction doesn’t just hurt us in the moment we need focus. It sneaks into the daily rhythm of the team. It insidiously attaches itself to our conversations. It changes our energy. It influences actions… the list goes on.
How does a leader handle distractions?
Noise, Nonsense, and Negativity
Start here. Not an exhaustive list, but these are the most prevalent forms of distraction for our teammates. They are also the lowest hanging fruit for leaders to address and eliminate distraction.
Noise… Noise is just that… noise. Noise gets our attention and compels actions that don’t actually fix anything. It is not a priority, yet we can find ourselves burning energy and cognitive capital chasing it down and “fixing” it. Noise comes in many forms. It’s an email from some section manager or chief that is trying to get a spreadsheet perfectly organized and is hounding people for some wicket of information. It’s a department wide email addressing a single individual’s screw up, of course with a threat of disciplinary action at the end of it. It’s the impending arrival of a new hire and all of the scheduling scheming that accompanies that. Noise is something you know about, and can’t do anything about. Which means, it’s a distraction.
Nonsense… or as we call it in the business, “as the rotors turn.” Interpersonal dramas have a tendency to dominate conversations in our drama addicted lives. If you don’t think that people love a good drama, just turn on your Roku and let the ads cycle. TV shows about the secret lives of XYZ lives abound, and our industry is not immune to the drama. We create our own. It’s not always secret relationships. It’s sometimes the quiet wars people rage against each other. The nurse no one wants to fly with; the medic that doesn’t know that his ego is caught in the zipper of his flight suit; or the pilot that deep down doesn’t believe in the mission, but loves the ego boost of flying.
…and all of this comes together at one time, on a particular shift, and gets crammed into a fuselage or ambulance. Don’t believe me? Watch who bickers and what they bicker about when they get back from a call. You’ll see that the nonsense is destroying team cohesion.
Negativity… above all else, leaders have to pay attention to this one. I have found that the Uber negative teammates are hurting the worst. They have no other outlet for their pain and the only way they can communicate is by being negative about everything. They aren’t bad people, but they need some time to disengage from the job and get their minds back in the game. Negativity is a symptom of burnout until proven otherwise. Burnout sucks for whoever is living with it, and it sucks for the people who have to work around it.
What To Do About Distractions
1.) DO NOT BE A DISTRACTION. If your leadership style or communication style creates a toxic environment or constantly breaks the focus of your team, then you are failing your team. You are hurting their success and development at the same time. If the work environment (aka command climate) itself is a huge distraction, you will not have the engagement or results you are looking for. If you are hounding people about noise and avoiding dealing with some nonsense issue that is distracting the team, you are the distraction.
2.) LISTEN. When your team is bringing up issues and offering you feedback, and they keep revisiting the issue, they are bringing a distraction to your attention. Noise comes and goes, distraction is persistent. Pay attention to it and remove it. Mitigate it if you cannot remove it, control it if you can. If you cannot, you must elevate the issue and engage your leadership in helping you reduce the impact of the distraction.
3.) PAY ATTENTION. If you are seeing drop offs and fumbles from people who are normally top performers, get in there and find out what is distracting them. For the love of all things sacred, do not start the conversation with, “you good?” You need to communicate specifically what you are seeing and give them room to respond. “Cody, I am seeing…”
In my experience, how you open or start that conversation will dictate whether or not you get to the heart of the matter or get shut out for good.
4.) FOCUS… focus the team on the mission. It is not the stress of the mission that breaks their focus and grinds people down. It is the death by 1000 cuts and nonsense that has nothing to do with the mission of the day that grinds down the edge. 37 emails a day with process changes, new education requirements (that are almost always attached to a threat of disciplinary action), QA notes, requests for something to be inventoried, or prep notes for the upcoming accreditation site survey clog our inboxes and our brain’s input channels. Leaders have to be clear to the team about what is important (signals) and what is not (noise). Signals deserve attention and focus, noise does not.
No one in the organization should have unrestricted access to your team to make demands on their time and focus without your approval. You should be filtering what signals go to the team and what noise bounces off the atmosphere.
The Bottom Line
The primary mission of the operator is taking care of the patient and executing safely. The primary mission of the leader is protecting the focus required to do it. Leaders at every level must aggressively eliminate distractions, safeguard cognitive bandwidth, and keep the team locked on the objective.
