One of my personal rules is to never deal with any topic that could be emotional over email. And like many of my rules, I came to it through trial and error.
I was a new manager, supervising the evening adjuncts at a small college. We got a handful of complaints about a new faculty member. “He was just having us listen to business reports. We aren’t learning anything.” I observed his class, and yup, they were listening to reports and the students were zoned out.
I wrote this well thought out email to him with suggestions for improvement. And I ran it by my supervisor for feedback before sending it. She offered some suggestions and I shipped it.
He was horribly offended, wanted nothing to do with me and you can imagine the rest.
I told my supervisor and she said “Well, maybe email wasn’t the way to do that.”
Wish she had said something BEFORE I sent those electrons flying.
We did get things smoothed out. My boss played good cop to my incompetent cop, and he did start interpreting all those news reports for students so that they could understand why he thought they were important.
If I could take my younger self by the hand, this is what I would have encouraged her to do:
- Invite him for in person conversation
- Get clear ahead of time what result you want (not just what you want NOT to happen)
- Start by framing the conversation “I’m glad we can meet and talk productively about how to get your students to connect the dots that you see as an expert.”
Lots of leaders let things slide, blow up occasionally or micromanage. The top ones recognize there is another way, and learn how to lead people so that they own the results.
As it says in the Tao De Ching:
The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”
