Excellence in email

For many years at Big Blue, I started every year by reminding my direct reports about communicating effectively. Since most of us spent 2+ hours a day JUST READING emails, let alone acting on any of them... changing the behavior of our organization was important - not just for ourselves, but for our division's success.

Now that I've led a startup from the ground up, I find that this reminder is still needed. Email is too simple to abuse. Meetings are too easy to bloat. Lazy communication is bad communication. These are all outcomes of the ability of technology to make us believe we're being inclusive, while at the same time, it is multiplying the cost of inefficiency while hiding it from the source.

SO.... I am sharing my reminder now, with you.

Be purposeful with every email and meeting.

Do communicate. Provide information, instruction, and insight. Be clear, be concise, and be done.

Don't fill up people's inboxes and calendars and leave it for them to figure out why they received the email or invite.??If they have to deduce "the why" or "what"- then YOUR communication is not clear or purposeful. ?

Every email sent demands work by the people that receive it to?a)?decide whether it is brief and clear enough even to bother reading it, ?b) work to figure out why they received it and if there's something they're responsible for, and?c)?take action described in it assigned to them.? ?If people receive emails from you that don't clearly and positively answer all of those 3... quickly, you've lost credibility and can be assured your emails will be often be deprioritized or ignored in the future - as they historically failed the "value test" of the recipient.??

EXECUTIVES' MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY IS TIME. EMAILS TO THEM MUST BE BRIEF, CLEAR, AND ACTIONABLE.

For the content of emails -?I highly recommend the use of a the BLIND or BLUF methods - which is what the US military (and Amazon) use as the measure of effective communication.

· BLIND: The Military's brilliant method of writing effective emails

· BLUF: The Military Communication Method

· BLUF: 3 things to communicate in email better

In nearly every executive mentor session I had where the person "had no time", invariably, the cause boiled down to low value/low action emails, low action / no agenda conference calls, and wasted time in 'no action agenda" meetings.?

They often caused this themselves by telling their teams to "over-communicate", and by demonstrating "copying everyone they think may have some interest". This proliferates into a culture, and the network effect takes off - with email and meeting glut.

?“Over communicating” rarely is “actually communicating”.? Most people think they’re keeping people in the loop when they cc: someone on emails or include them in meetings – when they are really simply being lazy in communication and putting the work on the recipient to figure out what, if anything, they have to do from it.? Efficiency in volume, content, and audience is key to effective communication, and in successful teams.

Every email and meeting should not only have a purpose – every person receiving it or participating should clearly be told its purpose, why they are a participant in it, and what their needed action from it is.? If they have no action or anticipated action in the VERY next step - they likely don't need to be on that email or in that meeting.

...and for the love of people and your organization, stop using CC. It means "you don't have an action, but I'm "covering my carcass".

Build the habits of the team and yourself.? Bad email and meeting habits rob you and the organization of time and effectiveness.? Good ones make for happy and productive individuals and teams.

In closing, I want to share how the above insight came to me... via my colleague and friend over lunch at Leadenhall Market in London.

We'd just completed our two years of integrating into IBM's business, and that time was full of great stress, and tremendous change for all of our teams, our own lives, and our careers. As we met at the restaurant, Peter sat down, and I was shocked. He looked relaxed, satisfied, even... at ease.

I exclaimed: "You look fantastic! How in the world....?!?"

... and Peter's answer brought the light of dawn to my dusky reality.

"Jonathan, I've come to realize that the fewer emails I send, the fewer I get. The more concise I am, the more people respond concisely. The less I ask to be copied on, the less I worry about things others get paid to do the worrying about. I get so much more done by doing less... and so I can take care of me and my people better."

This was counter-culture to the company. It was the opposite of what all the management was saying to each other and had said since every manager and executive was in diapers. It was in fact - brilliant.

...and when I started doing like Peter had done - I was promoted every 18-24 months for the next dozen years.

Peter - I hope you're enjoying retirement. Your wisdom taught a young and aspiring executive to be better, do better, and help others to do the same.