To Improve Performance, Audit Your Employees' Emails
Because the rhythm and rhetoric of effective email exchange is a critical success factor in business performance, mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of other weaknesses in your organization.
But no executive has the time (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) to review and edit their people's correspondence — it's not possible and it wouldn't be healthy. So how can managers quickly and cheaply create the shock of self-consciousness to push their people to take the style and substance of their correspondence more seriously? And how can you find out the interoffice spam actually reflects a deeper issue of employee performance?
I've found that the most powerful approach is also the simplest: make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews. Insist that colleagues and subordinates better evaluate their email so that you may better evaluate their performance. There are few better proxies for assessing how well individuals are communicating, on task and on target, than the digital missives they send in order to get their work done.
The key is to politely demand self-assessment and review. Ask people to present three sets of correspondence that demonstrate how well they've used the medium to manage successful outcomes. In other words, have them select examples illustrating their own email "best practices" for results. You, and they, will find this review and prioritization process revealing. Culling their email correspondence is a wonderful way for individuals to remember and reconnect with what they think works and what doesn't. Your ability to weigh their self-assessed success with your own experiences gives this simple technique particular power.
At one project review, every single example selected by one manager featured brief emails with large reports or presentations attached. Email wasn't a medium of communication; it was a mechanism for referral. The larger issue was that this person was so intent on being "comprehensive" that they avoided getting to the essence of what their colleagues asked for and needed in the moment. At another, the employee literally annotated and expanded upon the emails received; all the "best practice" emails were "responses" to others rather than ideas and solutions he initiated. These email styles raised larger and more important issues around performance and personal effectiveness. They likely would not have surfaced without the email self-assessment demand.
It's remarkable what can be discovered when people are asked to show examples of what they think they're doing well.
I'm not so tech-naive to constrain this performance review technique to email alone. Firms using wikis, blogs, internal Facebooks, and other digital media for coordination and collaboration should similarly broaden the purview of their performance reviews. But I am surprised that only a small handful of the managers and executives I know make this tactic a part of their assessment process. Conversations around real examples of real work — particularly if they represent how individuals actually see themselves — tend to be productively revealing.
My personal/professional opinion is that too many managers think that they already have adequate insight into the communications styles of colleagues and subordinates because of their own interactions with them. Or because they are cc:ed on correspondence that matters. This is shortsighted and misleading. The truth is that it is always important and relevant to learn how one's people rate and rank their own effectiveness. Of course, getting people to submit the "worst practices" and stupid emails they sent would truly be a fool's errand for a performance review. But gaining insight into your people's perceptions — quickly and cheaply — from the examples they themselves choose strikes me as an ideal way to improve one's own effectiveness as a communicator and leader.
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