The way leaders communicate sets expectations for how the rest of the team communicates. At a recent coaching session with a Managing Director we were discussing why the rest of the organisation appeared unproductive. After coaching it became apparent that it was how the Managing Director communicated with the wider team that was driving the poor productivity, specifically his bad email habits. Below I highlight three ways in which leaders misuse email:
Hyper-responsiveness
If you’re constantly checking your inbox chances are you aren’t using email very effectively. Over time, that makes email itself a source of anxiety. My client confessed to feeling uncomfortable as a result of simply not knowing what was in his inbox, and he worried that if he didn’t stay on top of it, he would drown in it.
These are fallacies that can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies. First, it means your attention is constantly getting pulled from higher-value activities so you can handle an incoming message—often a trivial one.
Hyper-responsiveness to email doesn’t just chop your day into a series of small slivers of work punctuated by distraction, it also increases the volume of email you’re likely to get, and if you’re a leader, that can magnify your entire team’s email load proportionately. Think of it this way: The faster you reply, the more responses you’ll get in.
One of the best ways to reduce your total email load is to let it “age”—in other words, simply waiting for an hour or two before you reply, or holding your reply for the next day. This allows you to “batch” your time spent responding to email during defined periods, then ignore it the rest of the time so you can focus on other things.
Weekend and night time ‘check in’s’
My client was checking in on his messages in evenings and on weekends, which put pressure on his team members to do the same. Over time, this became part of the company’s culture, leaving no one with truly uninterrupted downtime to recharge away from work.
If you’ve had a history of late night emails to your team, you need to acknowledge it first to yourself and then to your team members. Since it affects them, too, it isn’t just a personal quirk you can deal with by yourself. Bring it up at your next team meeting. Come clean with them about the bad habit and discuss it with them.
Over cc’ing
In your company, do people often feel they have to cc multiple parties, even on mundane emails?
You may think you’re just keeping the team in the loop. However, remember that every email has to be opened, read, mentally processed, and then “handled,” even if that just means moving the email to an archive folder or deleting it. Be intentional about when you do and don’t cc someone, and work with your team to determine what situations deserve cc’ing and which ones don’t.
