It's just email, right?

Why should you care about how you present yourself in email? To put it bluntly, you don’t want to look stupid. While email is undoubtedly a powerful tool that allows the average person to communicate with an unprecedented number of people quickly across huge distances, it also gives us unprecedented power to make asses of ourselves on a global stage. There’s a rule I learned from working on technology projects that says that you can do things fast, you can do them cheap and you can do them well, but you can only achieve two of those three goals on any one project. The idea is that if you try to do things quickly and on the cheap you’re bound to have a bad result. And a similar rule applies to email communication. Email is certainly fast and cheap (which is why it’s so popular with spammers), but you also have to make the effort to do it well if you’re going to avoid getting yourself in trouble. Most of us take the speed and ease of email communication for granted without considering all the things that can go wrong when we don’t bother to communicate clearly or to consider the life-changing results that can happen when we get caught up in the dizzying speed of electronic communications. I’m not just talking about what happens when you send your boss a message full of typos or when you mean to forward along a message to a friend with a snotty comment and accidentally hit the “reply to all” button by mistake. The incredible, thrilling power of email can easily extend to getting you fired or changing the path of your entire career.

Since I’ve spent most of my professional career working at various incarnations of a law firm which, Borg-like, continues to absorb other firms as it grows and occasionally changes it’s name, the examples of career suicide by email that I know best come from the legal world. I’m sure every industry has its favorites. Mine is the farewell email from an associate at the big firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. I get the garden variety of these emails every week-- you probably do too. Someone is leaving the company and they drop a note to everyone in the office letting them know where they can be reached in the future and thanking all the people who made the firm such a wonderful place to work. (Which always makes me wonder-- if it’s such a great place, why are you leaving?)

The email from the Paul Hastings associate left no such doubt in anyone’s mind. His email declared that he was leaving to become a “trophy husband,” which he explained would be “a step up from my current situation” at the firm. And while he did manage to thank some of the people he had worked with, he also complained that "I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities," and that he would rather be “dressed up like a piñata and beaten than remain with this group any longer." Apparently not satisfied that he’d thoroughly finished off his future practicing law at a large firm, he wished Paul Hastings "continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated associates into an aimless, shambling group of dry, lifeless husks."

Honestly, it’s the kind of email that we’ve all wanted to send at one time in our lives or another. In a way I kind of admire the guy for actually following through on that fantasy we all have every now and then of living out that “take this job and shove it” moment. Other people must also have taken pleasure in his moment of uninhibited criticism, because the email escaped the confines of Paul, Hastings and spread in the wild with remarkable speed. Within 24 hours everyone I talked to in the legal industry had received at least one copy of the email. I had five of them forwarded to me, even though this was before I was teaching “email etiquette” classes. And while I have to respect the associate’s chutzpah, I have to cringe when I think what this incident may have done to his career. I hope that trophy husband thing worked out well for him, because even though the whole incident happened a couple of years ago, that email is still floating around out there. It’s still lurking in people’s inboxes waiting to get forwarded and stories about the episode can still be found in the archives of the legal news websites. I’m not going to print the poor guy’s name, but it’s easy enough to find if you do a little searching on the web.

Chances are he probably never meant to send the message in the first place; apparently he made a futile attempt to recall it once it had gone out. But if he didn’t mean to send the message he never should have written the email in the first place, and he certainly shouldn’t have addressed it. I’ll admit I’ve written some hotheaded things myself, but I always make sure that the address fields are empty so I don’t run the risk of accidentally hitting the “send” button and making a fool of myself. And if he really did address it and send it on purpose, he made a big mistake in not realizing that his potential audience was much larger than the list of names in his “To:” and “Cc:” fields. Every one of the co-workers he sent the message to (including those he insulted) was free to forward the message along to anyone in their address books. From the speed with which the email made the rounds of the legal industry, I’d guess that just about every one of them did.

Another favorite cautionary tale? How about the spat between two legal secretaries working at the firm of Allens Arthur Robinson in Sydney, Australia, which started with email accusations that someone had stolen the makings of a ham sandwich, progressed to a public exchange over which of them made more money, why one couldn’t keep a boyfriend, and whether blondes really are dumb, and wound up with both of them getting fired for misusing the firm’s email system. Sounds like a urban legend? Well it’s not. I’ve seen pictures of both ladies in Australian newspapers. According to the urban legend debunking site Snopes.com, this one is true. As Snopes recounts:

The pair's e-mail spat was forwarded to colleagues at Allens, who copied it to rival firms, including Mallesons, Phillips Fox and Gadens. Soon it was sweeping the city's legal and financial offices, drawing comments from employee of Westpac, Deloitte, Macquarie Bank and JP Morgan. The two secretaries who had descended into slinging words at one another were fired by the firm, and an Allens Arthur Robinson spokesman said anyone involved in forwarding the e-mail along to others would be disciplined. "E-mail is a business tool, not a personal messaging system. The use of it in this case was not in any way acceptable, nor is that the way we expect people totreat their work colleagues," he said. "We have taken appropriate disciplinary action against anyone who dealt with the e-mails inappropriately."

http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/ham.asp

Like the associate’s bridge-burning email, the argument between the two secretaries didn’t stop with them; the email spread throughout law firms in Australia and eventually made its way around the world as one of those “they can’t make up this kind of stuff” news blurbs. The fallout from the incident didn’t stop with them either. While they were both fired, other employees of Allens Arthur Robinson were also disciplined for forwarding the message along to their co-workers as well as to people outside the firm. You don’t even have to write a nasty email to get in trouble-- all you need to do is forward one.

Though these might seem like extreme examples, they are really only exceptional in that they were seen by so many people and briefly made their way into the media. Trust me, people lose their jobs over email every day-- I’ve even known a few. And it could happen to you. For more stories and more suggestions on how you can avoid committing the kinds of mistakes that can make you look stupid or even get your fired, keep reading.