Last Friday Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist professor at Wharton and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column saying that not responding to email was rude.

I’m really sorry I didn’t say hi, make eye contact or acknowledge your presence in any way when you waved to me in the hallway the other day. It’s nothing personal. I just have too many people trying to greet me these days, and I can’t respond to everyone.

That sounds ridiculous, right? You would never snub a colleague trying to strike up a conversation. Yet when you ignore a personal email, that’s exactly what you’ve done: digital snubbery.

Two days later Mark Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures, penned a 1600 word response on Medium saying he thought it was really dumb.

That people just got too much email, his examples?

Do you think that the CEO of Google should answer every written letter he receives? Should Jeff Bezos be required to address every written complaint that shows up in Seattle or Satya Nadella at Microsoft?

He goes on lumping every social media platform request together with email and how it’s impossible to respond to them all.

Grant’s post specifies colleagues and makes no reference to social media requests.

I also doubt that Suster’s examples are the folks Grant had in mind.

The great majority of workers don’t keep schedules the likes of Bezos, Page or Nadella nor do they carry the same responsibilities, so it’s actually a pretty dumb comparison.

But Suster has a big following in the tech world and I’m sure there are thousands of techies who will happily latch on to his words as justification to continue ignoring emails.

Image credit: matthewreid

Pretty much everyone I know responds to my emails (yes, emails) on their smartphone.

They respond to email because they know I don’t text.

As a result, I am inundated with emails that not only respond to the subject at hand, but provide me with constant comedic content.

They don’t need to try and be funny, because their phone’s autocorrect takes care of that.

And gives me the opportunity to make (as a Brit friend says) smartarse comments.

That said, I’m taking this opportunity to show I really do understand the difficulty they are facing.

It’s not their fault.

They are all much too busy to review their emails before hitting “send.”

Image credit: Language Log

Why is it that the most difficult part of management, i.e., people management, constantly moves backwards?

Managers from the Greatest Generation tried to manage by memo.

That lasted until the 1970s when Boomer and Gen X managers took a giant step backwards and started trying to manage by email.

Millennials have taken an even larger step in that direction by trying to manage by text and have swept many of the previous contingents along with them.

Granted, people at all levels often look for and find ways, frequently turning to available technology, to avoid, or at least minimize, the most frustrating and difficult parts of their jobs.

However, that doesn’t work when the frustrating part is 90% of the job.

Every time this comes up I find myself quoting something Terry Dial said to me decades ago.

“People are 90% of our costs as well as the key to customer service and satisfaction. The only thing that should take priority over hiring a new employee is keeping a current one.”

Wally Bock puts it this way (and offers excellent advice on how to do it.)

In the Marines, I learned that when you’re responsible for a group, you have two jobs. One of them is to accomplish the mission. The other is to take care of the people.

I personally guarantee that you won’t accomplish the former if you ignore the latter.

You cannot “care for your people” by email or text — it requires face time.

It requires one-on-one conversations — wherever they take place — and not just about performance.

Conversations need to be human, that means family, hobbies, food, sports, etc.

Face-to-face humanizing contact is critical for teams, too, whether they are in a different office around the block or around the globe.

As Valerie Berset-Price, founder of Professional Passport says,

“Building trust is a multisensory experience,” she says. “Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses” to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult to resolve.

So whether you consider yourself a manager, a leader, a boss, or just a plain working stiff honing your in-person communication skills will not only improve your career opportunities, but also all parts of your life.

PS I just saw this article on IBM’s move to have teams in-person face-to-face.

Image credit: gorfor

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Although the focus was elsewhere, Friday’s post mentioned that Zirtual CEO Maren Kate Donovan chose to notify her 400 employees that they were and laid off by email. Definitely not good management. Way back in 2002 I wrote that you can’t mange by email; in 2016 I’d add text, Twitter and all social media to that list. Some things you just need to do face-to-face.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Hooray, I’m vindicated! And in Business Week, no less.

The article (now a 404 error), about the importance of reducing email reliance and encouraging face-to-face meetings, is a must read for every manager who is looking to boost productivity, spark innovation, and improve retention of both employees and customers.

Recognition of the problems and misunderstandings email causes is finally gaining a higher profile and being researched and documented by top academics and consultants.

My November 27th post contains a link to an article on the dangers inherent in how one choose to sign-off at the end of an email.

Google “dangers of email” and you’ll get back nearly five million results.

As to my vindication? Here’s an article I wrote for a client’s company newsletter in 2002.

You Can’t Manage By Email

Email. Some people can’t live without it and others refuse to live with it. The debate as to whether it’s a blessing or a curse may rage on, but one thing is for sure: You can not manage by email.

As a manager it is your responsibility to encourage, motivate, challenge, and develop every person on your team. No matter your style, you must be teacher, mentor, coach, cheer leader, and fan for each individual for whom you are responsible! (Hey, you wanted to be a manager, remember?) That said, it should be obvious that these functions aren’t particularly email friendly, any more than they were memo friendly in the dark ages before email. Further, even those that seem as if they should work are dependent on writing skills that are beyond most people’s ability.

Now, don’t get defensive. Look back at email you’ve received from just one person with whom you are close and count how many times

• you asked for clarification;
• you found that actions predicated on your interpretation were either awkward, or downright incorrect; or
• your understanding of what was written left you questioning/confused/annoyed/angered/ hurt/etc., which was not the intended effect.

If that’s the batting average of someone you know well, how much more likely are misunderstandings to happen between two people who not only aren’t peers, but where one possesses substantial leverage over the other? (By definition, managers have leverage, whether or not they use it.)

Email is good for such things as

• quick alerts (The meeting starts in 10 minutes.);
• a public thank you (Thanks, Lucy, you gave a terrific presentation today!); and
• simple, clearly worded instructions (Please collect everybody’s project notes and be prepared to discuss them with me at 10 AM tomorrow in conference room A.)

Although there are rare occasions where it works, in most instances using email to manage (encourage, motivate, challenge, and develop) is similar to driving blindfolded—you’re going to have an accident. Lower productivity and higher turnover are the results of management accidents, and neither is likely to give your career a boost!

To succeed at management you need to recognize some basic facts:

• You are managing people (AKA, wetware), not androids (software) so you must lead, not program, them.
• Living entities respond best to personal interaction, so spend the time willingly.

Your people do not interfere with doing your job, they are your job, so nurture them and they, in turn, will guarantee your success!

Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

In 2011 serial entrepreneur Matt Weeks described what he calls the “startup social contract”. In it he talks about the tradeoff of salary for equity and that the basic premise is that the employees have the company’s back, the company has theirs and what happens if it is violated.

If the workers and/or the exec team come to disrespect, disbelieve or ignore this social contract, the company is lost.

Zach Ware, managing partner of VTF Capital, adds another dimension to what it means to have your people’s back and it’s crucial information as funding tightens.

“There is absolutely no reason for a company to shut down overnight. That’s a result of a selfish set of decisions a founder made.”

Ware spells it out by comparing what he did in his own startup, Shift vs. what Maren Kate Donovan, when she shut down Zirtual and laid off 400 people by email.

To start with,  Donavon claimed her CFO gave her incorrect numbers (he denies it) and that she was pitching to the last minute.

“The reason we couldn’t give more notice was that up until the 11th hour, I did everything I could to raise more money and right the ship.”

In actuality she bet 400 other people’s lives on a roll of the funding dice and then took the coward’s way out using email.

Ware finds her reasoning specious.

“Every founder should have a real-time understanding of their business. It doesn’t matter who does it. You have to know it. You have to know your horizons,”

Choosing to not only be a founder, but also CEO, means that, when all is said and done, the buck stops with you. Period.

No reasons, no excuses.

Image credit: HikingArtist

In 2012 we looked at how a bad judgment and a toxic, dysfunctional culture killed off the 113-year-old premier law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf.

But having read the latest I have to revise what I said.

In addition to bad judgment, think gross stupidity.

I suppose I should say “alleged,” but the evidence leaves little doubt regarding just how stupid these bosses were.

Consider the smoking emails between Steven Davis, Dewey’s former chairman; Stephen DiCarmine, the firm’s former executive director; Joel Sanders, the former chief financial officer; and Zachary Warren, a former client relations manager.

Four men, who were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with orchestrating a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to keep it afloat during the financial crisis, talked openly in emails about “fake income,” “accounting tricks” and their ability to fool the firm’s “clueless auditor,” the prosecutors said.  (…) One of the men even used the phrase “cooking the books” to describe what they were doing to mislead the firm’s lenders and creditors in setting the stage for a $150 million debt offering…  

And ignorance isn’t a viable excuse for lawyers by any stretch of the imagination.

The global number one rule in our post-Enron world is that you do not write anything in emails that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your newspaper.

In case you aren’t familiar with them, the Darwin Awards “are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.”

Perhaps there should be a special award for people who kill companies through acts of excessive stupidity.

Image credit: Tombstone Generator

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

I’ve cited Harvard Business School’s James Heskett’s insightful questions and the discussions they foster many times.  

This time he asks if listening is becoming a lost art.

In his new book Quick and Nimble, based on more than 200 interviews, Adam Bryant concludes, that, among other things, managers need to have more “adult conversations” —conversations needed to work through “inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings” —with our direct reports. Such conversations require careful listening.

In the same book he reports that CEOs expressed major concerns about the misuse and overuse of e-mail, something that they feel encourages disputes to escalate more rapidly than if face-to-face conversations had taken place instead. The latter, however, would require people to listen.

As to the concerns about email, I would add abuse to the misuse and overuse, as well as adding texting, instant messaging and, although not as obvious, cell phones. (Nobody is really listening while navigating rush hour, zipping down the highway at 70 or listening to the GPS when they are late to a meeting.)

Listening is both skill and art, but it’s also a revenue generator—just ask Tony Hsieh, whose own willingness to listen helped create a culture that’s the envy of corporations everywhere, while the listening skills he encourages in his CSRs have sold millions of pairs of shoes, or the Asana founders, who built the company on mindfulness, a philosophy grounded in listening.

Incorporating listening into your cultural DNA requires it to be universally manifested starting with you.

If you aren’t willing to put down your phone, discuss stuff in person, facilitate and carefully listen to disagreement then don’t expect anyone else to do so.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Read any savvy business article and it will say that companies would find ways to keep innovating, because in bad times innovation is what keeps you in the game—whether legal or illegal.

Contrary to popular opinion, most drug lords are concerned about the same functions as other businesses—production, logistics and especially marketing.

In an article last year, Chris Harrison, chief illicit laboratory chemist at the Arkansas lab said, “The drug cartels operate just like any other corporation would — if they want to increase their market share, then they’re going to have to change something about it. This is just an evolution. They’ve saturated the heavy users, now they are moving onto some other people.”

Meth may be extraordinarily profitable, but it tastes horrible—bitter, not particularly enticing and it’s illegal—which makes expanding your customer base difficult.

So the crooks have turned to innovation, adding color to emulate rock candy and fine-tuning the taste to increase the market.

These are classic approaches used by consumer products companies for decades to attract new customers—prunes became dried plums and the market exploded.

Dried plums are far more consumer friendly—as is meth that is sweet and tastes like strawberries or chocolate.

The innovations started a couple of years ago in small test markets, Idaho, Nevada, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin, California, New Mexico, Minnesota and Washington state (where I live—oh joy), but thanks to a stupid hoax email are likely to spread.

The hoax email says that bags of “Strawberry Quick,” a type of meth that looks like rock candy, are being tossed into school playgrounds to hook the kids.

No, that’s not being done—yet.

But I have to wonder if the people who created the hoax cared that today’s hoax could become tomorrow’s drug marketing phenomenon.

After all,

• consumer marketing has been using give-a-ways to introduce people to their products for decades; and
• drug dealers have email, too—and they are big on innovation.

Image credit: Live?Laugh?Love on flickr

I had an interesting experience today—actually, I found it amusing, but ridiculous.

I used to live in Silicon Valley, the land of early adopters and the technically obsessed, and am still involved with several groups there.

Here’s the short version of what happened.

• Around noon one of the project members sent an email to all of us saying he urgently needed certain information and asked if ‘Joe’ had it;
• Joe replied around 1 that he didn’t have it, but maybe a Jean did;
• Jean replied around 1:45 that only Mary had access to it.

I saw the thread around 2:15 when I got back to my office, called Mary and told her that she urgently needed to respond to the thread.

She did and the situation was dealt with immediately.

What was so ridiculous is that the entire group knows that

1)     Mary is the only person with access to this info;

2)     That she is ‘technologically challenged’; and that

3)     she doesn’t read email as it arrives; she checks it on and off when she has the time.

That means that email wasn’t the best choice to contact her and everybody knew—if they had stopped to think about it instead of running on autopilot.

There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.

The problem lies in focus; your choice should depend not on your preference, but on the preference of the person you are trying to reach.

So remember, communicating is like playing golf. The trick isn’t to play the whole course with one club, but to know which club to use for which shot.

Image credit: ks on sxc.hu