ADD or LDA?
I have been finding that it is quite in vogue for my clients to refer to themselves or to one of their functions as suffering from corporate ADD. While this affliction is not something to joke about for those who suffer its effects, I do find it commonly referenced in only partially teasing fashion within many of the organizations that I visit. No function within the enterprise is pointed to more commonly than sales.
You may think your sales function has Attention Deficit Disorder, but it is more likely Limited Discretionary Attention (LDA), the insufficient ability to give the requisite amount of attention to all the different issues that demand it. ADD implies the inability to stay focused due to incapability, but I think this is an unfair characterization for many of the sales functions that I advise.
These people are not incapable - to the contrary - they are often amazingly capable, but they have too much on their proverbial plates. It may appear that they can’t stay focused on the topic that you want to be the center of their attention. The problem is that you are competing with a bevy of other just as important topics, and they all require attending to now.
If you want to work successfully with functions encountering LDA, you have to learn how to work within this environment – it is not a disorder, it is a reality. I learned this lesson most potently when working with a global media company a while back. All of the executives had an array of video screens in their offices, monitoring most of the cable news stations. My time with these high-powered individuals was spent sharing their attention with news anchors across the channels. To be stopped mid-sentence was continuous. To have an exec bolt from the room shouting orders at handlers in the adjoining cubes just as I was about to get to the point was commonplace.
This was their work environment, and I needed to adapt if I were to be effective. There are methods for making this work. Some suggestions you might consider to work effectively with your LDA function follow:
- Sound bites on steroids – if you want to get a point across, be brutally succinct, cut to the chase first, give detail second, don’t blather
- Solutions, not just problems – while this is important in a lot of places, the last thing you want to do is to point out a problem without a solution in your pocket (otherwise, you are the problem)
- Relevance, to the right person – raising something to somebody with LDA when the topic is important to you but not to them is the first step toward becoming noise
- Avoid becoming noise – you have a finite number of times to raise things, if you always sound the same and don’t vary your tune, you are officially noise
- Don’t take it personally – perhaps the hardest lesson to assimilate, but being ignored is not a sign of rudeness or your status, it is an indication of another priority getting attention instead of yours