08/20/2026
One of my coaching clients, a thoughtful and generous guy I'll call Rob, told me something a few weeks ago that I’ve not been able to stop thinking about.
Rob's boss asks great questions. Genuinely great ones, the kind I wish more of the leaders I work with would ask, like, “What's the hardest part of your job right now?” and “What can I do to support you?” Those are the sorts of questions that open a door and invite a person to walk through it, and Rob, to his credit, walks through. He tells the truth, says the hard thing.
The trouble is what happens while he's saying it.
His boss is looking down at his phone. Slack, probably, or Teams, or email, or a text, or one of the seventeen other channels through which we are all now reachable at every waking moment.
And at the end of the conversation, the boss says, warmly and with what I believe is total sincerity, “Thanks so much for sharing! Let me know if you need me on anything,” and then the call ends, fast, the way calls do.
Here is what Rob said to me: “Did he really hear me out? It felt like I was talking to someone who was only 30% there. And I don't believe him when he says I should contact him if I need anything.”
Rob's boss thinks he is building trust. He has the questions, he has the warm tone, he has the open (virtual) door. What he does not have is Rob's belief that any of it is real.
There's a name for this. The term is boss phubbing, which I only learned about relatively recently. Phubbing is phone snubbing, and boss phubbing is what happens when I, as an employee, feel that my manager is distracted by their phone while in my presence.
The research on this is pretty clear.. A study of US adults across a range of sectors found that when leaders are distracted by their phones, it undermines trust and decreases employee satisfaction, which in turn lowers job performance.* Another study found that employees who perceive their boss as using a phone during interactions tend to feel socially excluded, which chips away at their organization-based self-esteem, which is the fancy way of saying it makes them feel like they don't matter here.**
So the boss gets a little bit of inbox triage done, and the employee gets a little lesson in their own insignificance.
Before anyone thinks I'm up here on a pedestal, let me be clear that sustained attention is hard for all of us right now, myself very much included. Our attention gets hijacked every ten seconds. In keynotes, I like to say that the bells and lights and dings on my phone make me feel like a caffeinated squirrel in a nut factory, and everyone laughs because they know exactly what I mean.
Digital distraction is the number one enemy of compassionate awareness in the modern world, and it is winning most days, in most meetings, in most organizations I encounter.
Which brings me to a line I say from stage a lot, because it's the whole thing in five words:
If we're not there, we can't care.
Here's what I love about this problem: the fix is not a mindset shift, or a values exercise, or a two-day offsite. It's a set of behaviors, and behaviors are learnable.
Author Daniel Coyle has spent years studying high-impact leaders, and he found that they tend to do the same handful of things when they're with the people they lead:
-Purposeful and appropriate eye contact. When you’re on Zoom or Teams, this means you switch between looking at the person’s face and/or the camera on your computer.
-Many questions, few interruptions. Resist the urge to cut someone off for any reason, but especially because you thought of a solution while they were speaking. Allow for silence and listen a little longer before you solve.
-Staying quiet, nodding, leaning in while listening. Literally, lean your torso forward, towards your computer. This is a small, almost invisible, thing. But it’s wildly effective for communicating attentiveness, connection, and care.
-Using humor. If you have the gift of humor, please use it! Laughter is a trust accelerant, and it's free.
-Keeping a relaxed body. Tension in you creates tension in them. Breathe deeply, relax your shoulders, relax your belly, unclench your jaw, soften your gaze.
-Being courteous. Please, thank you, I see, you're welcome. The manners your mom taught you are, it turns out, a very big leadership competency.
Sadly, we’re living in a world where people are forgetting how to do these basic things while they communicate with one another. It’s time to remind ourselves of the basic nonverbals that signal presence, care, and connection.
So here's your experiment for the week. Pick one recurring one-on-one. Before it starts, put your phone in a drawer, or face down and across the room, somewhere that makes reaching for it an real decision rather than an unthinking reflex. Close your other tabs, all of them, including the one you think you can peek at without anyone noticing. (They notice.)
Then ask your great question, and do the hardest thing a leader does, which is nothing at all, until they're finished.
If you want extra credit, say this out loud at the top: “I'm putting my phone away for this, this is 100% about you!” That sentence holds you accountable, and tells the person in front of you that they're your priority. Because somewhere out there is a Rob who would very much like to believe you mean it.
Warmly,
Andrea
P.S. If this one hit a little close to home, welcome to the club, I wrote most of it while resisting the urge to check my notifications. Hit reply and tell me how the drawer experiment goes!
* James A. Roberts and Meredith E. David, “Boss Phubbing, Trust, Job Satisfaction and Employee Performance,” Personality and Individual Differences 155, no 1 (March 2020): 109702.
** Raja Mehtab Yasin, Sajid Bashir, Abeele, Mariek Vanden Abeele, & Jos Bartels, “Supervisor Phubbing Phenomenon in Organizations: Determinants and Impacts,” International Journal of Business Communication, 60, no. 1 (2023): 150–172.
