How to write inspirational emails to reinforce your leadership skills

If you are in a leadership position in your organization, the one thing that every non leader employee apparently craves for is a lesson in leadership. And you, being the leaderest leader that any leader could leader, are just the right man/woman for the job. Except you are running out of ideas to write inspirational emails. You have already sent out dozens of mails this year and they were all about some star of the quarter awards, or new customer signing events, or visits to corporate offices for festivals, or even the last quarter results - where you always had something to talk about. But those templates are overdone now, and you want something fresh. The template below should just serve the purpose.

Subject Line - You must make sure your employees must read it not as some announcement about hiring or successes, but something that you philosophize daily. So, for example - 'Great News!' or 'Good Morning Team' or even 'Your Daily Dose of Leadership' are bad ideas. Instead, use words like 'Deep Philosophical Musings' or 'A Contemplation of Possibilities'. Just enough to intrigue the reader so that they open the mail. The vaguer the words, the more curious they get. The only other time your employees open an email with such zeal is when the subject reads 'Your salary hike letter'. And you can't beat that.

Email Body - The most important bit is starting the mail on a completely unconnected topic. It could be an event you attended, participated, or even saw it on television, or overheard from someone. Make sure it’s not something big that everyone knows, like the recent FIFA world cup finals, where people already know the lessons via LinkedIn. It could be something as unrelated to football as presence of Deepika Padukone who unveiled the trophy while wearing a Khuda Gawah costume. The lesson here is do well in acquiring connections and the world will invite you for totally unrelated ceremonies. But more on that some other time.

Back to the email body. Start with an obscure event such as when you went for an outing with your family to the nearby market yesterday. Think of all the things you did there, that literally every other person in that market did - shopping, eating, and wasting another weekend. But only a true leader derives leadership lessons out of the mundane stuff. With all this, you now have inspirational email that should look like below.

Hi Team,

Yesterday, I went out with my family for our weekly outing to my favorite place - the shopping street. We did some household shopping which my wife loves (Or we did go karting which my husband loves. The template is gender proof.), followed by a lovely dinner at a cozy café that we both like. It was a clear, starlit night which I love so we walked back to our home.?

Once home, it got me thinking. It was a perfect outing for us, but there were so many things that clicked together to make it perfect for us. To start with, the immense collection of items that the shopkeepers had inventoried, the talented hands that make all these items in the factory, then the chef who knows how exactly what our palates would like, plus the meteorological department who accurately predicted it will be a clear sky this night which allowed us to walk back home.

And then it struck me that this is exactly how our organization operates. I envisioned all of you as the thousands of invisible hands working tirelessly to build the items to sell them to me at the lowest price possible, and me as the shopkeeper who sells these items to our customers, and together with all of you I make a profit.

Our chef is like the sales team who entice the customer with their selling skills that help us win the deal and after paying them half a per cent commission, I make a fortune when the stock goes up.

Not just this, our support staff is like the meteorological department which predicts with brilliant accuracy the problems that customers will face in our product because we have not fixed them even after so many years. But we will be fixing them entirely next year, I promise.

In essence, for a company to run smoothly, we need all engines to fire, and dare I say the engines of our little spaceship are chugging along with our batteries fully charged (Don't bother about technical inaccuracies, the context is what matters).

I thank you for being part of this ever-growing amazing workspace. For sure you would agree that due to escalated hiring costs, we must work on the new projects with the same resources. That does mean, in all positivity, many of us would get to collaborate with multiple customers in different technologies in different time zones. Now try to imagine how many happy customers would there be when each of us tackles more than 2 projects simultaneously, and how many perfect dinner outings all those customers could have!

With that, I end my pondering here, and wish you a happy rest of the workday.

PS - If there are any busy leaders who lack the time to write leadership emails, I am happy to oblige them for a small fee. After all everyone needs a perfect dinner outing.