Surviving Email Politics at Work
How to avoid career-limiting email habits
Work email is a tricky thing. You can use it to your advantage, or get hanged by your own past emails. In Netflix’s hit series, House of Cards, Frank Underwood would never send an email unless it helped forward his agenda or pin down an opponent. And he certainly would avoid putting anything potentially damaging or revealing in any of his emails. It simply leaves too discoverable of a trail, and emails are too easily forwarded. But in the workplace, things aren’t quite as dramatic or obvious as in a serial dramas. And the repercussions of any ill-advised emails are typically not revealed within the one-our story arc of a single episode. In fact, you use email so much at work that you are likely unaware of bad habits that, over time, shape potentially unflattering perceptions others have of you.
Practically speaking, email is the best record keeper of communication you’ve had with colleagues and partners over time. Notice how people send recap emails after important meetings to help create a paper trail of what transpired, who owns what, and so on. You can search through all your email to find what you’ve shared, committed to, what was sent back to you, and so forth. After particularly hectic weeks, I sometimes look through that week’s emails to remind myself what I’ve worked on. Put a different way, the body of all your email — made up of dates, messages, conversations and shared files — represents your “work memory.” But this can also cut two ways. More on that later.
Your work email also represents your reputation — your “word,” how you conduct yourself. When you commit to, and complete promised tasks by certain dates, you demonstrate that you’re responsive, reliable and professional. Likewise, you use email to influence others and get them to honor commitments. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Here’s what makes it tricky though. You’re human. You’re emotional. Sometimes you even send emails when you shouldn’t. Maybe you were a little angry when you pressed send. Or perhaps you were in a hurry or careless. Maybe you broke a “promise” by not following up quickly enough or by the date to which you committed. Tsk Tsk. And now there’s a record. Oh, that memory thing again. See how it gets tricky? I won’t even get into how you look when you try to be sarcastic or passive aggressive in emails. And, remember, some colleagues may take pleasure in your mistakes and even use them against you. Your supervisor may also go through emails sent to her before your quarterly or annual reviews. Bad email habits can adversely impact your career.
I Did This. Don’t Do This.
Just to make sure you don’t feel too bad about some email mistakes you may have made, I’ll share one of mine. I’m sure I’ve done worse but either I’ll never admit that to you or I’ve selectively forgotten it in order to bury my shame deeply enough so that I can still get out of bed every morning and maintain polite conversations at cocktail parties.
So, after grad school, after getting a personal dream job at a major video game company, I even surprised myself by quickly leaving for a startup. This was a mobile gaming startup, and high flying at the time. While I was excited to be there, I had walked away from the culmination of years of hard work to get to the dream job I just left. This raised the stakes for me, and when I found the new company culture to be highly political, I found myself minding my p’s and q’s for survival.
By far, the best part of the company was that our Studio Team made great games, wildly creative games of wonder and delight. So I leaned into it. I pushed hard on press reviews because critical acclaim could get our humble titles accepted by important customers. A couple years into the job, we had just put out a new game, and it earned a perfect 10 review from a respected gaming publication. It was a coup, and boy did I want to let everyone know. In fact, this particular outlet had only given out two perfect 10s in its history, and the last one had occurred eight years prior. Very rare and valuable. They had to hold a special meeting just to approve it.
Sounds great, but here’s where I blew it. In my elation, I shot off an email to the entireexecutive team with the subject line “PERFECT F***ING 10!!!” Immediately after I pressed send, my joy melted away into creeping concern. Let’s do an instant replay, shall we? F-bomb? Check. ALL-CAPS. You betcha. Blatantly self-promoting? Arguably. Seemed like a good idea at the time? Sigh, yes. “Uh oh. Was that OK? Is this bad? This is bad isn’t it?” The only thing worse is to try to retract the email. Remember the curved blue arrow that says “I’m taking this back, but you can still read it and now you certainly will because I put a huge blue arrow on it showing I don’t want you to?” At least I didn’t do that.
The CEO ended up sending a positive reaction, but I’m pretty sure that it was perceived as either immature or lacking good judgement by some of the people on the chain. It was a gaming company, which is supposed to be irreverent by nature (complete with lots of swearing at the office), and, yes I was justifiably excited. Back then, we didn’t yet use the term “humble brag” but this action certainly could be labeled at least as that. What I didn’t do was take a moment to think about how this would affect how others perceived me. I also distracted us from the important message, which was that we had achieved something cool together. And now it was in email, with my name on it, coloring this situation and my reputation. I still wince a little when I think about it.
Your Email is Your Reputation
Email is an extension of you, part of your reputation. What you say and how you conduct yourself over email is the professional “you.” Managing this carefully is important. We’ve all encountered, and perhaps have been guilty of bad email behavior including over-CC’ing, instantly responding, emailing angrily and putting untenable promises in writing. Considering how important your emails can be to your effectiveness at work, I chatted with some colleagues to put together a survival guide. We believe that if we all did more of this, we’d build better reputations and relationships, and avoid unnecessary politics.
1. Respond Thoughtfully, Not Instantly
We all know people who respond to emails immediately — sometimes even before the original sender has released his or her mouse button. While a fast response can be important for urgent messages and make you look responsive, it could also signal that the sender may not have enough to do, or hasn’t thought enough about the issue. To establish a good email reputation, take a minute to think before responding, and make sure every message contains quality info. If you don’t need to respond, don’t. People who respond in large email threads just to show they are “present,” but don’t add value, also start to stick out.
2. Don’t Turn CC into CYA
Perhaps as outdated as the carbon copy from which it takes its name, the CC: function may have caused more headaches than it’s averted over time. While it can be useful to CC: people on a message to provide important information or keep them posted on the progress of a project, CC: is too often used as a catch-all to protect against any backlash. To protect your reputation, use CC: judiciously — only for people who need to know, when they need to know. Don’t be afraid to remove people from threads if they’re no longer needed or to add people who need to be informed (but do always make a note when you alter the recipients list). And feel free to ask others: they’ll tell you if you’re copying them too often on things they don’t need to know about.
3. Keep It Clean
Think about what you take away from other people’s emails — even before looking at the content. Is the email nicely formatted and well thought out, with consistent fonts, correct spelling and punctuation, and clear content? Or is the email dashed off haphazardly in all lower case using eight different fonts, with typos excused only by a sheepish footer message? Which of these do you think builds a better reputation? Your emails don’t need to be perfect, but they should strive for a level of professionalism, both in form and content.
4. Keep Your Word
The good and the bad news about email is that it creates a written record. This means you can sort through your inbox to find out what you need to do, or check your outbox to see what you’ve promised other people. But this also means any colleague can forward your boss the email where you promised you’d review that Q1 report by Friday… when you still haven’t reviewed it by the following Wednesday. To avoid being caught slacking by email’s impeccable memory, make sure to promise only what you can deliver, in writing or otherwise. I know how this can happen. Maybe you really want to say “yes” to a request, just be realistic with the deadline, or don’t commit to it. Colleagues will get annoyed once they detect this pattern from someone on the team. The upside is that if manage expectations through email well, you’ll quickly gain a reputation for being a reliable professional, rather than a person who creates more commitments than results.
5. Don’t Email Angry
One of my favorite bosses very early in my career used to frequently say “let’s read that again to make sure we took all the “f*** you out of it.” By the way, Blog Law #4218 allows me to swear in a blog post when someone else said it, not me. Anyway, we were a small company and were often asked to respond in writing to important, powerful customers. The communication was tense, and we often felt threatened and antagonized. That said, we were the vendor and they were the customer. It didn’t do us any good to let our emotions get in the way since we had more to lose than they did. The same goes for email. Sleep on it. Re-read it. Get a second pair of eyes on it. Stand down. Holster your weapon. Once you fire that shot, it’s part of history (and an easy part of it to forward around).
6. Be Human
We’ve all gotten emails that have aggravated us. We’ve also gotten emails that made us smile. Which kind would you rather send? Too many people adopt a stern tone in email or CC supervisors, assuming it increases authority. It doesn’t. Be professional in your emails, but recognize we’re all human. Toss in the occasional joke or emoticon (but not in every sentence). Recognize that some people don’t work during evenings and weekends, even if you email then. Show coworkers your human side and you’ll gain a reputation as someone realistic, approachable and well liked.
By sending thoughtful messages to the right people, in the right format, in a reasonable timeframe, and keeping your word, you’ll create an impeccable email reputation for yourself. You’ll also avoid tangling with the likes of Frank Underwood who believes that “There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.” Remember, your email is your reputation and it creates a permanent, searchable record. Wield it wisely.
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A version of this post originally appeared on the Acompli blog.
