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I realise in some ways emails seem a bit basic, or even hum drum. We receive tens if not hundreds daily.
And, if we are honest, we read them quite selectively. How many unopened emails are lurking in the bottom of your inbox?
So, if we are selective … so are the people who receive emails from us.
Tricky!
How do we make sure our audiences read and reply with what we need from them quickly? Here are three ideas to help:
#1 – Say something useful. Basic, I know, but often not so.
#2 – Use simple visual formatting so your message is easy to find
#2 – Insert tables, screenshots and other images with care.
Let me unpack each of those for you.
Say something useful. How many emails are never opened and not missed?
To be useful, think super carefully about your purpose and make sure you are adding value to your recipients before you hit send. In particular,
Use simple visual formatting so your message is easy to find. I am shocked at how often I brace myself to read emails that appear in my inbox. Here are three tips to reduce this shock for your recipients:
Insert tables, screenshots and other images with care. A great example of this came across my desk this week, which in part stimulated this post.
My client offered about six screenshots along with five lines of text to explain her problem. However, she inserted the text in between the screenshots, which rendered them invisible.
To avoid that happening to you, I suggest keeping tables, screenshots and other images to the end of your email.
The only exception is where there is just one visual followed by a big block of text. If you add just a few words after an image they will be lost.
I hope that helps and look forward to providing more ideas next week.
Kind regards,
Davina
Negotiation skills go hand in hand with communication as they help us go beyond being ‘just' clear so our messaging is also compelling.
I had the recent pleasure of meeting Matt Lohmeyer of Negotiation Partners who shared some fabulous ideas about business negotiation.
For example, he encourages us to NEVER say no.
His reasoning was fascinating, and led to a deeper conversation about how to shepherd an idea through an organisation as well as how to negotiate formal and informal deals.
>> Click here to register for this Friday 8 April workshop (8am AEST).
Davina has helped smart people all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for 20+ years.
She began this work when she joined McKinsey & Company as a communication specialist in Hong Kong where she helped others use the Minto Pyramid PrincipleⓇ.
She continued helping others when living in New York, Tokyo and now back in Australia where she was approved by Barbara Minto herself to teach Pyramid.
Her clients include experts across many disciplines across Australia, Asia Pacific, New Zealand, the UK and the US. She currently coaches a number of C-suite executives as well as many mid-level folk and the occasional graduate.
Get her 4 Tips for Communicating Complex Ideas here.
Do you wonder how much effort to invest in different pieces of communication?
Do you prioritise according to …
Let's use two routine examples that emerged in my coaching work this week to think about this and refine how we think about each of them using a simple framework.
First, two routine examples to set the scene
Imagine you have two emails to prepare today:
Example 1: A 250 word email seeking leadership support. You need your five-person leadership team to agree to change the course of your project in light of complications caused by an unexpected technical glitch.
The change doesn't require any extra budget but does require your team to change their priorities which will lead to deprioritising another important project.
Example 2: A 150 word email to 3,000 staff. You have discovered a new security vulnerability in the latest Google Chrome release and need the whole organisation to manually update their browser immediately.
The steps that each of the 3,000 people need to take are simple but critical and you are aware that many of your employees are not ‘tech savvy' and may need explicit instructions to complete the update.
So, how do you decide how to proceed?
Next: a simple framework to help you prioritise your effort
By thinking about two important dimensions: impact and size of audience, we get to a different conclusion.
This allows us to correlate our effort and our end game by prioritising our effort according to a balance between the impact the communication will deliver and the risk of slowing the organisation down (or worse) if it goes wrong.
And … a counter-intuitive conclusion
Both of these examples need ‘proper' investment but using this approach we would pay more attention to the Google Chrome vulnerability email. Here's why:
Although the email to all staff seemed fairly simple, the risks and potential time loss were both higher than that for the leadership email.
If the staff email was poorly done, the cost to the organisation would have been substantial
If the leadership email was poorly done, the cost would have been less significant
I hope that provides some food for thought this week and look forward to sharing more ideas with you next week.
Kind regards,
Davina
Davina has helped smart people all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for 20+ years.
She began this work when she joined McKinsey & Company as a communication specialist in Hong Kong where she helped others use the Minto Pyramid PrincipleⓇ.
She continued helping others when living in New York, Tokyo and now back in Australia where she was approved by Barbara Minto herself to teach Pyramid.
Her clients include experts across many disciplines across Australia, Asia Pacific, New Zealand, the UK and the US. She currently coaches a number of C-suite executives as well as many mid-level folk and the occasional graduate.
Get her 4 Tips for Communicating Complex Ideas here.
This is what happened to Chad.
Chad is a software developer at a trading firm.
Although fluent, English is his second language and this makes him nervous about his communication abilities.
He has also had feedback that his communication can be too aggressive, which has heightened his anxiety.
However, when I meet with him I find a warm, engaging and enthusiastic person who does not seem the least bit aggressive.
So, what is going on here?
To illustrate, I will first outline the situation that led to a lengthy and frustrating email chain, then offer our before and after emails before offering two questions you can ask to avoid putting yourself in Chad’s position.
The situation that led to a lengthy and frustrating email chain
When Chad and I worked through an email chain between him and some overseas colleagues, the issue slowly became apparent.
His communication was polite and detailed.
But it missed one critical ingredient.
Instead of explaining why something needed to be done, he jumped straight into how the overseas colleagues needed to do it.
This, in turn, led to a ten-email chain debating the details of the task, with a heavy overtone of ‘do it yourself’ from the overseas team.
Let's have a deeper look at the issue by reviewing the original email and an alternative.
Our before and after emails
Even though the information is technical, I think you’ll see what I mean when I show you the original (sanitised) ‘so what’ message versus the revised one:
Original – We need your help to come up with the implementation that supports System A in filtering the symbols and foreignID.
Revised – Given our own ABC filtering mechanism leads to a configuration that is hard to maintain, we need your help to implement ‘System A’ in filtering the symbols and foreignID.
Interestingly, the rest of the email changed dramatically too.Â
It no longer consisted of a list of reasons why the suggestions from the overseas team were wrong, it included a list of reasons why he needed their help.
On reflection, he decided that if he had drafted this email in the first place the whole chain of about 10 emails would have been avoided.
And the problem would have been fixed much sooner.
So, how to avoid this happening to you?
Two questions to ask to avoid putting yourself in Chad’s position
This experience raises an important issue for me that I hope will help you also.
Before ‘smashing out' your next email request ask yourself these two questions so you are sure about your audience's situation:
I hope that helps.
Have a wonderful week.
Davina
Keywords: strategy, emails, ESL
Davina has helped smart people all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for 20+ years.
She began this work when she joined McKinsey & Company as a communication specialist in Hong Kong where she helped others use the Minto Pyramid PrincipleⓇ.
She continued helping others when living in New York, Tokyo and now back in Australia where she was approved by Barbara Minto herself to teach Pyramid.
Her clients include experts across many disciplines across Australia, Asia Pacific, New Zealand, the UK and the US. She currently coaches a number of C-suite executives as well as many mid-level folk and the occasional graduate.
Get her 4 Tips for Communicating Complex Ideas here.
 A ridiculous thought, isn't it?
Emails are a mundane and routine part of corporate life.
Most are short and many of us send and receive hundreds of them daily.
Business today cannot progress without them.
But what if your emails routinely elicit a groan from their recipients, so much so that they flag them for ‘later', and then often don't even open them?
Does this mean that you miss out on important responses, and also get a reputation for being frustrating to work with, sloppy in your thinking and someone who takes a long time to get things done?
Where does this leave your career?
This was the experience of a client this week who was stunned at the difference that changing her emailing style could create.
She found that by starting with just a  short introduction (perhaps just one sentence for a short email) and then getting to her key point straight away the response time rocketed and she
Now, imagine if this small change could be replicated across your whole organisation. Imagine if your whole team – from secretaries upward – were able to consistently make some small changes to the way they prepare their emails: business would move so much more smoothly for you.
Decisions would be made more quickly, there would be less frustration and more people would feel good about themselves at work.
And then extrapolate that further to think that the same techniques could be applied to other documents: board papers, steering committee papers and other presentations.
Imagine – an email-based productivity revolution.
Ridiculous!
In Clarity First we help people cut the amount of time it takes to both their communication – in any format, including email.
Clients tell me they cut the amount of time it takes to prepare important communication in half. Sometimes more.
They are also more likely to be promoted as their good ideas get the traction they deserve.
Why not check us out?
Clarity First is the most affordable top-tier program you will find.
It is easy to go to extremes when giving email feedback: either so harsh that your recipient is upset and is either so offended or angry they ignore your suggestions or so soft that they miss the point altogether.
This can be because we are either too cautious about upsetting someone and too aware of the limitations of the medium or because we are in a rush and don't realise the impact we are having.
AÂ short article from Fast Company by Sara Marco of The Muse provides a simple formula for getting the balance right: not too hard but not too soft either: just right.
When providing feedback to your team members as they start to use storylines, Sara Marco's approach will work brilliantly.
It provides an opportunity to highlight what your team member has gotten right, and also what they can improve.
Without this level of consistent feedback, your teams are unlikely to stick with the approach and give you the results you need: less rework for you, more great ideas being approved by those higher up.
And, what I love even more about this article, it is written using a pretty solid grouping structure.
Click here to have a read and see what you think.
 Keywords: emails, leadership communication, leadership skills
Davina has helped smart people all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for 20+ years.
She began this work when she joined McKinsey & Company as a communication specialist in Hong Kong where she helped others use the Minto Pyramid PrincipleⓇ.
She continued helping others when living in New York, Tokyo and now back in Australia where she was approved by Barbara Minto herself to teach Pyramid.
Her clients include experts across many disciplines across Australia, Asia Pacific, New Zealand, the UK and the US. She currently coaches a number of C-suite executives as well as many mid-level folk and the occasional graduate.
Get her 4 Tips for Communicating Complex Ideas here.
 A ridiculous thought, isn't it?
Emails are a mundane and routine part of corporate life.
Most are short and many of us send and receive hundreds of them daily.
Business today cannot progress without them.
But what if your emails routinely elicit a groan from their recipients, so much so that they flag them for ‘later', and then often don't even open them?
Does this mean that you miss out on important responses, and also get a reputation for being frustrating to work with, sloppy in your thinking and someone who takes a long time to get things done?
Where does this leave your career?
This was the experience of a client this week who was stunned at the difference that changing her emailing style could create.
She found that by starting with just a  short introduction (perhaps just one sentence for a short email) and then getting to her key point straight away the response time rocketed and she
Now, imagine if this small change could be replicated across your whole organisation. Imagine if your whole team – from secretaries upward – were able to consistently make some small changes to the way they prepare their emails: business would move so much more smoothly for you.
Decisions would be made more quickly, there would be less frustration and more people would feel good about themselves at work.
And then extrapolate that further to think that the same techniques could be applied to other documents: board papers, steering committee papers and other presentations.
Imagine – an email-based productivity revolution.
Ridiculous!
In Clarity First we help people cut the amount of time it takes to both their communication – in any format, including email.
Clients tell me they cut the amount of time it takes to prepare important communication in half. Sometimes more.
They are also more likely to be promoted as their good ideas get the traction they deserve.
Why not check us out?
Clarity First is the most affordable top-tier program you will find.
Davina has helped smart people all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for 20+ years.
She began this work when she joined McKinsey & Company as a communication specialist in Hong Kong where she helped others use the Minto Pyramid PrincipleⓇ.
She continued helping others when living in New York, Tokyo and now back in Australia where she was approved by Barbara Minto herself to teach Pyramid.
Her clients include experts across many disciplines across Australia, Asia Pacific, New Zealand, the UK and the US. She currently coaches a number of C-suite executives as well as many mid-level folk and the occasional graduate.
Get her 4 Tips for Communicating Complex Ideas here.