by Nick Morgan
I’m not sure you’ll have a chance to look at this, but in case you do, here’s a report that could entirely 180 our approach to the client at 9:00 this morning. It’s long at 27 pages, but there’s a 3-page summary at the beginning that will give you the gist of it. See you at 9:00 sharp!
The implicit rudeness of this communication— I don’t care enough about you or these matters to give you time to absorb them properly because your opinion doesn’t really matter to me—should make it a no-no for everyone, but we don’t always meet the high standards we set for ourselves, do we? Don’t send last-minute reading bricks to others, and don’t read them if they come from someone else. That’s a rule we all need to live by.
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130 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Third, don’t send hot emails. We are all familiar with the perils of the email sent too quickly, hitting the “reply all” button when we meant to reserve that snarky comment for the author of the original email, not the entire team. Or we’ve responded in haste and anger to something and regretted it later.
The solution to this problem is pretty simple in theory and tough in practice: self-restraint. Introduce a policy of waiting until you’ve cooled off. Or writing an email and sending it the next day, after you’ve slept on it and had a chance to reread it. To be able to do that, of course, you need to build back in some of the time that our friction-free universe has allowed us to cut out.
The time pressure will never go away, but for any kind of virtual communication (email, text, voice mail, video messages, etc.), the more you can build in a waiting period, the less likely you are to send a communication that embarrasses you, ends a relationship, or terminates a career.
Fourth, establish a virtual message hierarchy. Try to use a channel that’s appropriate for a particular message when you need to convey something. Use a text message to say “running 10 minutes late.” Use an email to say “Attached is the first draft of the report for your consideration.” Use an audioconference to update the team in brief weekly sessions, complete with emotional channels deliberately built back in. Use a video session for deeper discussions, rehearsals, and other more substantial interactions. Finally, if you must communicate delicate, emotional, or otherwise fraught matters via virtual channels, create an additional virtual space for the inclusion and consideration of emotions.
Fifth, consider the use of emoji. These visual tools are a crude first attempt for people to put back into text messaging and social media the emotions that too often get misinterpreted or left out.
Make sure you include a section of your communication where, Chapter_06.indd 130
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at the minimum, emotions can be exchanged, with emoji or in some other way. Make it an emotionally safe space if at all possible. And make it a requirement. The sender needs to indicate how he or she meant the communication to be seen emotionally, both in what emotional state it was sent and in how it’s meant to be received. And the receiver needs a space to show how the message was indeed received.
It may seem clunky at first to force yourself to do this extra emotional work, but when you think about the time, money, and human desperation involved in sending, receiving, and untangling unintentionally hurtful messages, for example, the work is clearly work worth doing. You have to deliberately, and imperfectly, put the body-language channel back in where the virtual world has removed it.
Of course, email relies on good writing. What are the rules of good writing that particularly apply to email? Let’s look at some of them now.
Maintain clarity, a viewpoint, a clear idea, hierarchical thinking, and grace of expression Written communications should be kept short when possible.
Good communication is an exchange of attention for insight.
You email on the fly while you’re doing something else; when you’re in a hurry; when you’re trying to deal with many issues at once; and when you’re exhausted from computers, iPads, phones, and other devices. You compose emails in the airport, in the car when you shouldn’t, or anyplace else where you can snatch some time. The list of impediments to thoughtful, ele-gant, concise prose is as long as everything you have to do. You can’t pay enough attention to the job of creating the email, and your recipient can’t pay enough attention to the job of reading it.
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132 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Clarity is the cornerstone of good writing Good email communication begins with clarity—like all communications. To achieve clarity in an email communication, you must first have a clear thought. Alternatively, you can write to find out what you’re thinking. If you follow the latter course, then you owe it to yourself and your readers to always be prepared to edit, to rewrite what you have written.
Don’t say, “The final success of the outcome will be ascertained by a careful consideration of a combination of all the inputs, the experiences of the participants along the way, and the specific para-
meters of the analysis of all the measurable takeaways, deltas, and observable changes in the gathered data relevant to the experiment.”
Do say, “The results will determine the success of the experiment.”
Clarity and brevity necessarily go together. The more you write, the greater the chances that you will write something hard to understand or that someone will misunderstand. It’s a com-monplace that the pace of life and work just keeps on increasing.
This observation means that we often lose track of the big picture or that we simply don’t know what we don’t know. These challenges hugely increase the need for someone to keep us straight—to give us a few simple rules to keep our heads in the game, above water, and screwed on tight. And oh yes—get it done in twenty reading minutes, please, like the written equivalent of a TED talk.
When you’re done with your first pass at a written communication, put it aside for at least sixty seconds. Then go back and reread it, edit it, and make sure it is clear. Look particularly for emotional clarity. Remember, it is the emotions that are too often lacking in our virtual life, and they are hard to get right in an email. Put an extra sentence in deliberately at the end to make Chapter_06.indd 132
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your emotions clear if you fear they may not be: “I mean this sincerely; I’m not being sarcastic.”
A final caveat on clarity: lots of research suggests that people often misunderstand each other in email or overestimate the success of an email communication. For example, recent research shows that people believe email requests are just as effective as face-to-face—but the reverse is true.1 So even as you use the medium, keep in mind that it is not as effective as speaking to the person live. Email is just more efficient. Another recent study showed that in-person conversations or phone calls made the person sound smarter than the same script conveyed over email.2
Indeed, overall, one in three workers has misjudged the tone of an email.3 Many of these people got upset about what they thought was a colleague insulting them or saying something personal—when nothing personal was intended at all.
Research has further shown that ambiguous emails increase stress in the workplace and lead to more friction between coworkers.4 When you’re constantly wondering whether your colleagues are upset, or if you’re interpreting their comments as sarcastic or rude, of course you’re going to feel stressed-out.
Why is it so difficult to correctly judge the tone or subtext of an email? We tend to overestimate both our ability to convey the tone we want to convey in an email and our ability to judge other people’s tones.5 We think we know exactly what we’re saying, and we think we know what other people are trying to say—but we’re wrong. Why? The answer is egocentrism.
Researchers Justin Kruger of New York University, Nicholas Epley of the Uni
versity of Chicago, and their colleagues have studied the issue and found that we are helplessly stuck in our own perspectives.6
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134 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Kruger and Epley had people email statements, either sarcastic or serious, to a partner. The senders thought their messages would come through clearly 78 percent of the time. But they were wrong. Their partners understood the writers’ intended tone only 56 percent of the time. The partners might just as well have flipped a coin. And even worse, the people reading these emails thought they had gotten the tone right 90 percent of the time.
We think we know what our colleagues (and our friends and maybe even our partners) are trying to say in emails and text messages, but we’re wrong. We think our own communications are crystal clear, but we’re also wrong. What can we do about this communication gap? One simple answer is to get on the phone. But, of course, we all need to send emails; it’s a fact of modern life. Kruger and Epley found one possible solution: try reading your emails out loud a few times, in different tones, including offended, sarcastic, or angry tones, before you send them. The researchers found that reading a message in a way you didn’t intend makes it easier for you to step outside your own perspective and appreciate that you might be misinterpreted. And that’s a first step toward better communication.
Make sure your writing has a point of view What we humans care about fundamentally is each other’s intent. When you write, figure out your point of view, and make it clear. State your point at the top, if possible. If not, present it as soon as possible. The alternative looks and feels to the receivers like sandbagging, and they feel betrayed. Don’t do it.
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something out of the entire meeting and the focus on the deliv-erables and structure for the reorg going forward. But next time, don’t show up late.”
Do say, “I was upset that you were late, but the meeting was productive, and everyone was satisfied with the outcome of the reorg.”
To make sure you do have a clear point of view, you need to find moments of passion. One of the best ways to keep your writing interesting is not to think about your passion in general—
everyone knows you need passion—but rather to provide contrasting moments of calm and passion throughout the email.
Contrast is memorable; a harangue all begins to sound the same after a while. Give people variety by working yourself up to a fine sizzle at key moments—but not all the time.
Tell the recipients something they don’t know—but don’t tell them everything you know. We all love to learn a little insider knowledge or a factoid that adds a bit of depth and complex-ity to a well-known story. The radio personality Paul Harvey made a whole career out of telling “the rest of the story,” adding little-known facts to familiar tales of historical personages and famous people. (“The name of that awkward lawyer who failed in business so many times? Abraham Lincoln.”)7
But we only crave a little extra knowledge. Too many writers dump way too much information on the reader. Restraint is key.
Again, keep it as short as possible—but no shorter.
Build suspense by starting a story or promising an insight and then delivering it later. This technique works for Dan Brown, and it will work for you. Introduce something—“In the next paragraph, I’ll show you how to double your net worth in six months with a simple trick”—and then follow through on the promise. Don’t overuse this technique, and don’t commit the cardinal sin of upselling—promising “six ways to increase your Chapter_06.indd 135
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136 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels IQ if you buy this other course I’m selling” —because upselling abuses the relationship between speaker and audience.
Finally, keep it real. Authenticity begins with clarity about your own values, goals, and needs. In this era, we demand more of one another—more authenticity, more emotion, and, yes, even more self-disclosure. You get to choose what you reveal. And we don’t want too much, but we need to know that you’re real. We need a point of view.
Make sure you have a clear idea
I always recommend beginning to work on a text-based communication with a single sentence. What’s the point you want to make? If you don’t know what that is, then you’re not ready to write. We’re impatient, so we jump into writing too quickly just to keep up with our email and to tick things off the to-do list.
Once you know what the point is, jot it down in a sentence.
You’re now ready to write, even if you never actually use that sentence in the document. For political reasons, you might not want to state your point right away, preferring to begin with mutually agreed-upon ideas, but you will have to get to it eventually.
But don’t hold off too long. We demand greater and greater transparency from our leaders and even from our email correspondents. We don’t like to feel manipulated. This demand has huge implications not only for internal communications, but also for external emails to clients and other business connections, who want to work more openly than ever before.
Part of your point should always be to make your intent clear and to show that it is both consistent and empathetic to the reader.
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will affect all the employees and the parking structure. There’s a whole set of imponderables that will need to be considered down the line before we go to the planning commission and the public. We will require an additional set of planning sessions as well as lengthening the timeline to include extra public assessment time as well as the sheer scope of things, which has increased.”
Do say, “Building the parking garage is going to take longer than we thought because it has turned out to be more controver-sial than we thought.”
Do the hierarchical thinking for your audience What is hierarchical thinking? It’s showing what’s more important and what’s less important. It’s distinguishing between the main point and the detail. It means that if you tell your readers that something is important, you also should tell them what they don’t have to know.
Hierarchical thinking keeps track of where you are. One of the kindest things you can do as a writer for your readers is to let them know where you are in the text. Number your points.
Tell your readers what they are in for. Make your progress clear.
Tell them you’re halfway through, as in “Let me pause here for a moment at the halfway mark to recap briefly.”
A recent study showed that memory is a zero-sum game.8 We forget one old thing for every new thing we learn. That’s dis-tressing, perhaps, for writers—most of us—because, essentially, we’re asking our readers to forget things as fast as we pour new ideas into their heads.
But before we writers throw in the text towel and stop trying to get our readers to remember anything at all, it’s worth turning this science on its head. Rather than seeing this zero-sum Chapter_06.indd 137
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138 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels quality as a discouraging fact, in the right light, we can find it very good news indeed.
How so? Modern businesspeople trying desperately to absorb all the information that comes their way every day are pictures of distraction. Knowing what’s essential to remember for modern life and success is a much harder puzzle than the acts of remembering and forgetting themselves.
Understood in this context, forgetting as much as you remember is a mercy and a necessity for survival in our information-rich modern world. More than that, helping peopl
e forget the right things becomes an important job in a world like the one we inhabit now.
Writers, take heart. By putting new ideas into the heads of your correspondents (and thus forcing them to forget old ideas), you’re helping clean the cerebral house, a highly important task given the speed and volume of new ideas.
Don’t say, “To understand the reasons for the upset around the parking garage project, we have to understand that the public was kept in the dark for too long about the purpose of the building. They were expecting an award-winning art museum, and instead they got a giant parking structure. This switch felt like a lie to the public, and so people were understandably upset.
This anger, and the increased tax burden already felt as a result of the increases over the last year, anyway, contributed to the problem. Also, the mayor’s lack of support for the project was crippling after her initial apparent support.”
Do say, “There are three reasons for the public controversy over the parking structure. First, and most important, the public was misled about the real nature of the building. Second, the mayor at first offered and then withdrew her support. And third, taxes have been rising recently, so any spending is an issue.”
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Offer your readers grace of expression
Grace of expression comes from practice, editing, clarity, brevity, and a few basic values—authenticity, consistency, transparency, empathy, and connection—that are especially important in the virtual world.
Authenticity. Grace of expression begins with authenticity—
personal clarity about what is important to you. Despite today’s demands to share more of ourselves, you can choose what to reveal. There is a balance between sharing too much and not enough. But people want to know that you’re real. You must be authentic.
Consistency. Today, in our rush to get things done, we use mental shortcuts for things that we used to do much more slowly. For example, we tend to use consistency as an imperfect test for establishing trust, a quality that is ever more important to us in a low-trust world. We accept that we ourselves can change our minds and suffer bad moods, but we’re much less likely to accept this kind of natural inconsistency from others.