Silence Is Golden at Work, BRIEF Lab’s Founder (Quietly) Explains [Full Q&A]

Our workdays are filled with never-ending interruptions: emails, Slack notifications, loud side conversations, and meetings that could’ve been emails. It feels difficult to sit down and think about what we’re doing.

In the recent book Quiet Works: Making Silence the Secret Ingredient of the Workday, Joe McCormack, founder of communications firm The BRIEF Lab, makes the case for why minimizing noise is crucial for leaders. He spoke with b. about how to turn down the volume in your workplace.

b.: How did technology get us to where we are today?

McCormack: It’s pervasive. So, it’s not something that a few people have — everybody has it everywhere. Connectivity is pervasive, devices are pervasive, technology is pervasive. It was at times incremental and at times just overnight.

The thing about noise is that it seems like we made a deal where we don’t even choose what we do. It’s all about attention. And our attention is completely spoken for. And that attention is noise. It’s like, well, there are things to pay attention to, and it’s … whatever you want it to be. It’s your bank account, a text alert, information, email, social media; the list goes on and on and on. And it’s right in your hand, right in front of you, and it never leaves. It competes for and dominates your attention.

b.: What are the consequences in the workplace? 

McCormack: Your attention is a scarce commodity, and where you invest it and how you invest it can have a huge impact. What happens with leaders when they’re scattered is they don’t know how to focus where their attention goes. So when they start communicating with their teams, with [their] organizations, they’re all over the place. The price of that is pretty serious — rework, confusion, anxiety, unpredictability, chaos at times, frustration. … They can’t focus on a single thing. They talk about a million things. Well, people don’t like working for people like that.

A lot of it goes back to, they have a lack of time alone during their day to think about their people, their priorities, their plans. They’re just running from meeting to meeting without really being deliberate, and what’s missing is five minutes of quiet here, 15 minutes of quiet there, alone. They’re just always on. When you’re always on, your ability as a leader is diminished. 

What most people do when they communicate is they’re thinking while they’re communicating. So they get on a call, or they have a conversation with a colleague, and everything is real time. That’s very, very dangerous … it’s going to sound disorganized, unprofessional, hard to follow. If you look inexperienced and unqualified, it’s probably because you’re too busy to take time alone to prepare before you communicate. When you do that, those few minutes of preparation can make a person who could have looked junior, look senior. 

b.: Is constant collaboration helpful or a hindrance? 

McCormack: One of the things that’s happened is the workplace has given into a paradigm of “to work is to collaborate.” So when you go to work, it’s about connecting with people, it’s about talking with people, it’s about communicating with people. It’s all about collaboration.

If you look at the modern workplace, it’s an open workplace. It’s an open-floor layout. It’s one of the reasons why a lot of people don’t want to go back to work after the pandemic. It’s very difficult to actually get deep work done in a collaborative workplace because it’s hard to tell people around you to stop talking; it looks rude.

One of the biggest problems is the entire workplace is designed for only one type of work, which is collaborative work. And my conclusion is that you need to break the workplace into two. You need to entirely reimagine it. You need to look at the workplace as a place for quiet work, concentration, and collaboration. That workplace currently doesn’t exist. So it’s very, very difficult for people to concentrate when they’re constantly interrupted and disrupted during the workday. 

b.: Why is silence the key to success?

McCormack: When you think of silence, think of time alone to think. It’s not the complete pure silence that people might imagine. It’s the absence of noise, the absence of distractions, the absence of others disrupting you. It’s time alone to think. And it’s critical to have that time because the world is fast. 

Our mission is (and my mission is, as an entrepreneur) to change the way people work together and alone. You can’t change the way people work together unless you work more alone, and that’s what quiet is. 

b.: What are ways to become a “quiet leader”? 

McCormack: Number one is, don’t treat quiet as a technique; treat it as an appointment. … It’s not about being good or bad at it; it’s about doing it. It’s about giving yourself the permission to pause during the day … to think about the things that you’re doing.

I equate quiet to stretching before you work out. … It’s this little thing you do before and after that makes the thing that you want to do — which is working with others — better. … I can work out smarter, and this is a smarter way of doing it.

The second thing is, link it to communication. I think that gives people motivation to make quiet a contributor to better collaboration. Ironically, talk about it. Nobody talks about it. Everyone talks about work. 

What looks like work is collaboration; collaboration looks like work. A person once said to me, “Wonder does not look like work, thinking doesn’t look like work, reading doesn’t look like work.”

So, the first thing you have to do is talk about it. What is the value of the time that we spend alone to contribute to the way that we work together?

If you don’t talk about it, nobody’s going to think about it, nobody’s going to do it. People don’t wake up in the morning going, “Oh, I should slow down and give myself permission to pause.” I mean, people think about that maybe because they’re exhausted or frustrated. … If you don’t talk about it, it won’t become important. You’ll just default to one type of work, and thinking is a very, very important part of work, but people don’t have time or a place to think at work. So the second thing people need to do is assign times and places for quiet at work. And most offices aren’t designed for that; most businesses don’t act like that.

So the first thing leaders have to do is to be willing to disrupt and say, “I’m going to do it differently.” Why? Because if you keep on doing it the same way, you’re going to keep on getting the same result.

Quiet Works is available now. 

This article first appeared in the b. Newsletter. Subscribe now!