T. A. S. K. Your E-mails

If you’re like me, you get dozens of e-mails per week about a variety of issues. And a trend I’ve noticed among my clients’ staff is the troubling frequency with which e-mailed instructions are lost through the cracks.

One thing’s for sure: the business world is not going to stop using e-mail. But that doesn’t mean you should let this unwieldy communications tool quash your ability to be efficient and effective. There are a couple simple things you can do to become more productive.

Immediately print out any e-mail that carries a task, an instruction, or time-sensitive info. You can follow the TASK guideline:

T = The email carries info that is time-sensitive.

A = Accuracy is crucial (you may need to use client language verbatim)

S = The info has to be shared with several team members

K = Keep this to document decisions, changes in direction, and for future reference

Why print out hard copies? For example, merely forwarding a client’s instruction to a colleague does not ensure that immediate action will be taken: you may need to walk across the plant to get the colleague’s attention and show the e-mail to underscore its details or urgency.

Also, to prevent duplication of effort, keep a notepad on hand for noting to-do items — eg, a client request like “Will you call me when the samples are ready?” This will reduce the time it takes to retrieve the e-mail a second time in order to extract the task or its deadline.

E-mail’s been around long enough now. Don’t join the ranks of those who constantly make excuses (“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I sent that back to you!” or “I did see that e-mail but it must’ve been deleted by the system. Can you repeat what you said or re-send?”)

Conflict in Reality

Perfect lives do not create interest. Few movie blockbusters or bestselling novels are based on perfect people who lead perfect lives, free of danger, ill will, or distress. Such stories don’t entertain. There’s no suspense to them.

Just because a TV program’s called a reality show doesn’t mean it honors reality. Most reality shows are loosely scripted—but scripted nonetheless—for friction, elimination, rejection, and confrontation. Consequently, reality show players are volatile, quick to fly off the handle. They confront before they have all the facts and offer up behind-the-back candor. There’s also a great deal of name-calling and cussing, and the sort of behaviors which—if you saw it out in public—would make you cross the street with your kids to avoid it.

The concern, of course, is that this bleeds into everyday life. Human beings are visually inclined and thus visually influenced. Watch enough people flying off the handle, and you come to believe it’s socially acceptable.

Who’d object if you blasted your horn at the driver ahead of you, slow to move after the light turns green? Did a co-worker irritate you? Maybe this person irritates everyone in the office, so what would be so wrong with blowing your stack at her? Maybe you’ve got a customer who’s constantly nagging and complaining, so dealing with him is exhausting. Who would hold it against you for confronting him with your objections to his behavior?

Perhaps we’re living in an age of reactive narcissism: We’ve become so anxious about detecting how we’re being “disrespected,” we’ve forgotten what it is to give respect. Conflict is not a green light for physical, mental, or verbal abuse. As natural and inevitable as it is to experience conflict and anger, don’t give up your right to choose. Your reactions are your choices. Your reactions are within your power to choose.

The role of conflict in reality TV is to drive up ratings. The role of conflict in reality is to tell us, “Something’s wrong here. Something important needs to be worked out.” How you participate in a solution says a lot about who you are, as a professional and a human being. 

When great things happen to good companies (but it all goes bad anyway)….

It’s a mistake to assume organizational complacency is just about smugness and self-congratulation: it’s also chronic passivity — what one writer calls an absence of “premortems,” or failure to thoroughly assess new initiatives before they’re set in motion.

Ironically, the causes come from positives in the organization’s performance history:

•  Management only wants positives. Sure, nobody likes chronic naysayers, but skeptics and devil’s advocates can provide analyses of potential pitfalls and difficulties. What happens? Aside from alienating otherwise engaged employees, it also means management grows accustomed to getting a chipper but incomplete report.

• “I’m the expert and you’re not.” Experts do tend to be right very often, but it’s an illusion to bet they’ll be right all the time. What happens? Specialist inflexibility or disdain for laypeople can be demoralizing for staff—and galling to customers who may also be laypeople.

• Unyielding belief in prior success. The more a routine succeeds, the more likely people are to assume the process is infallible. What happens? The organization grows rigidly attached to its more reliable solutions and becomes risk-averse (no innovation). There’s also an inability to learn and recover from costly mistakes.

• “We have all the best toys!” Technology, however sophisticated, is not infallible, and organizations often make the mistake of investing in IT protocols that make sense only to themselves and their IT guys. What happens? If it doesn’t make sense to your customers (or if it takes too much time to learn and adapt),  they won’t rely on your technology even if self-service options are available 24/7.

• “My folks are right.” Some groups invite debate; others strive for unanimity,  characterizing dissenters as flawed or badly informed. What happens? The tribalism of this can lead to faulty group rationalizations, presumptions of superiority, and miscasting of customers as ignorant outsiders.

The bad news is also the good news: much of the complacency problem lies in human nature, so there’s no known cure. But awareness helps reduce the problems created by complacency, and (I believe) the human mind can overcome any fallibility if the commitment to change is made.