If you’re having a hard time writing an email because it deals with a sensitive subject, start by thinking about whether email is an appropriate format at all and whether you’d be better off making a phone call, an in-person visit, or holding a meeting. Because sometimes it’s not what you have to say that makes the biggest impression, but the medium in which you choose to say it. There’s an episode of Sex and the City (of all things) that I often use to illustrate this point because it seems to have made such a big impression on so many people. Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw has been dating a writer named Berger (played by Ron Livingston of Office Space and the Geek Hall of Fame). Their relationship has been rocky at best, and when he breaks up with her he avoids doing it in person or even over the phone. Despite the fact that they’re both writers, he doesn’t even send a letter. Instead, he leaves her a Post-It note. Carrie’s outraged that anyone would do this, but her friends all have similar stories of break-ups conducted in inappropriate formats. Miranda says that she was once broken up with by a boyfriend’s doorman. As much as she tries to contain her anger, Carrie herself reacts inappropriately by lashing out at friends of Berger’s she runs into at a club where everyone lounges on beds and she nearly gets arrested for smoking a joint in public. But Miranda manages to get Carrie off with just a ticket by explaining that she’s distraught over being broken up via Post-It Note. Even the police, it seems, understand how inappropriate and unfair that is.
When it comes down to it, Post-Its and emails are actually very similar formats. They’re both great for certain simple things, like delivering facts or messages. The cable guy will be here between 12:00 and 4:00. And they’re both lousy for conveying anything that requires finesse or might produce an emotional reaction. It’s not you, it’s me. But email lends itself to much more damaging reactions than you’d ever get with a Post-It. Break up with someone on a Post-It and they might show it to their friends or, at worst, to some cops on the street. Break up with someone over email and they can forward copies to everyone, with their own comment. It sure as hell was him.
Anyone who assumes that the emails they write at work aren’t capable of creating an emotional impact is making a big mistake. Though I can’t say I’ve ever hung out in a Manhattan nightclub drinking Cosmos in bed or been caught by the police smoking a joint, I have experienced the workplace version of being broken up with via Post-It Note-- the resignation by email. Several years ago I had an employee send me an email that basically said “I resign effective two weeks from today” and nothing else. No greeting, no “it was nice working here.” Nothing. And it wasn’t like I was out of the office at the time or as though he worked far away and couldn’t have just walked down the hall to tell me. He was sitting in an office two doors down from mine.
While I’ll admit that we weren’t particularly close as far as work relationships go, I hadn’t had any problems with him either. Which made the whole incident pretty shocking to me. Because whether he knew he was doing it or not, my former employee was conducting the same kind of bridge-burning as the law firm associate who wrote the “trophy husband” email. You don’t want to alienate anyone with what you don’t say (“it was great working here”), or with the format you use (email, Post-It Note). Even though we’ve all wanted to, it’s rarely a good idea to annoy someone you might need as a reference some day. Especially if you work in an industry as small as mine, where everyone seems to know everyone else. Because you never know what’s going to happen.
One more example. A good friend of mine worked for an arbitration company that wasn’t treating her very well and had restructured her commissions so she was making significantly less money. When she got a better offer, she jumped at the chance to leave. Even though she hadn’t done anything wrong, the fact that she’d left her old company for one of its major competitors made her former co-workers feel as though she’d betrayed them. What she didn’t know was that the two firms were engaged in merger talks. Within a couple of months she found herself back at her old desk, surrounded by people who treated her like a traitor and looking for yet another job. In today’s business environment, where mergers and acquisitions are announced every day, the same thing could happen to any of us. Building and maintaining relationships by observing the niceties of business writing-- saying the right things and saying them in the right format-- certainly can’t hurt. While email might seem like the easiest way to deal with difficult issues, it can come across as insensitive and as a cop out. (No offense to those Sex and the City police, who actually turned out to be quite sensitive.)
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