You replied too quickly! Part 2 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place

November 11, 2021

You replied too quickly! Part 2 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place

This is the second article in a series about keeping work in its place.

I distinctly remember crossing the point in my life where a boss answered an email of mine in less than 5 minutes. I had sent a difficult question.

I stepped back from my computer.

Uh-oh. Hallmark of a bad decision.

I’ve seen them before; bosses who give you the quick, flippant answer and act annoyed that you asked such a simple question. I’ve found myself 6 months later with that same flippant boss, after massive problems, with him looking at me and pleadingly “Why did we decide to do it that way?”

Heather learned that day to note why a boss decided what they did.

Difficult decisions made quickly is the recipe for a bad decision. When I had my uh-oh moment, I was mid-level management. So that means that I had individual contributors/direct reports that worked on my team and then I worked on a team of managers with my boss. As such, I was a filter. I passed communication both ways but not all of the communication.

How communication and mid-level management is supposed to work. Mid-level managers communicate both directions up and down. But in all cases they engage filters, not passing along everything.

I stop problems that do not need to be escalated. The system is designed that each level stops 90% of the problems and only the toughest 10% of problems that are escalated to the next higher level.

For example, my Individual Contributors were faculty (READ: teachers) and they stopped 90% of the problems with students (unfair grading, exams too difficult, extension of deadlines). But the toughest 10% of their problems should be passed to me as their boss. I go to work on those problems. The toughest 10% of my problems go to my boss. As such, the upper echelons of an organization should be tasked with working on the very toughest of problems. They should not be "in the weeds" with trivial problems. If leadership is too caught up with small issues, something is wrong with their focus.

OK, back to the story. I actually wrote him back. “How dare you answer me so quickly? You haven’t thought about this long enough. You can’t handle the truth!”*

(*Not my actual email, but for sure my thoughts.)

Meme that says "you replied too quickly" with an image from the movie A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise's line of I want the truth.

It sounds trite but I don’t ask my bosses easy questions. If it was easy, I’d have figured it out myself. I send my bosses hard questions. They need to take time to think about it, to consider, to weigh the pros and cons to the decision. If I'm going to put their decision into play, I need to defend it. I need to know that the strengths and weaknesses have been acknowledged and a decision was still made. (Side note: FYI: that's the hallmark of a good judicial decision. There needs to be evidence of a consideration of multiple opposing viewpoints. There is a reason that we listen to "dissenting opinions". Judges WILL TOSS OUT decisions that appear frivolous and flippant.)

I would go on to use email response time to judge every boss I’ve had since. Too fast equals bad. If you are slow with communication, I could be impressed. But I'm not done observing.

I have 1,000 unread emails in my inbox

What if you are a boss that takes so long to reply that you have 1,000 unread emails in your inbox? You might want to stop reading now because I'm about to get rough. But if you are a leader-wannabe, read on.

First, if you have any email inbox with 1,000 unread messages, you should be immediately removed from any position of leadership and demoted to Individual Contributor.

You are outta there. Image of umpire ejecting a coach from a game.

WHOA!

Why?

Because when we see people hurting others, we first isolate them to stop the damage.

If there are that many unread emails and people depend on you, you are hurting them.

You are hurting your direct reports/individual contributors who have emails in that pile that:

update you on projects,
ask for you opinion on what to do in a situation,
ask for you to escalate some feedback.

You probably have emails from your bosses that:

Point to the organizational vision,
Ask for your response by a (now past) deadline,
Update you on an expected project.

Here is the problem, though. It's not the content inside those 1,000 emails now that bothers me. It is that you didn't care to manage your email better.

At work, we use a nice term, time management. But time management is, essentially, self-control.

Get some. Use it.

Role up your sleeves and make some hard decisions. Every time I have found someone with this many unread messages, there is a self-control problem. Yes, even you Miss But I'm So Important That I Must Read Every Email.

Newsletters/Auto senders

Unsubscribe.

Oh, but Heather, I route those into a junk email, so it's OK.

No it's not. Because...on whose time are you checking your junk email?

Work time? Nope. I will not support that. I've looked at the content and that newsletter is not that important.

On your time? No. Not a good idea. You are seriously going to peel off some dedicated down time to do "quasi-work". That indicates a problem with priorities. You cannot figure out the difference between work and non-work. You cannot decide what is important so you are making all of it all important. It is not all important. What is important is so narrow, you should be relieved to find it.

No one ever states that reading their own junk email account is satisfying. Stop it. Unsubscribe.

But I found that one piece so information, so I can't read/sort/delete!

Wrong.

Treating your email inbox like buried treasure is wrong.

Emails and messengers are communication devices, not libraries or vaults. Communication is meant to eventually cause action within a brief period of time. So each incoming email is asking you to do something. When you haven't read or deleted the email, you have not done any action.

Those actions can be:

Think about it and give them an answer.
Delete.
Re-route information to another location (calendar, files, etc.)

Email & messaging software is cluing into this and starting to link your email's information to its proper place. For example: Notice how your flight itinerary becomes a calendar item within the Google ecosystem? That's good. It should go there. The moral of the story here is that the correct data goes into the correct channel.

Still think that email newsletter is "too precious" because some little nugget comes along once in a great while? Go to the source. If that information is so precious, the source should be archiving it in a searchable way. If the information is not archived, the information is not so precious. Get it OUT of your email.

But wait, I really do get 1,000 emails a day

What if you are a boss that has an email account publicly advertised (like a company president) and you get TONS of legitimate emails so there actually are this many unread emails in your inbox?

Please. Hire someone to read and answer emails for you. No company president worth their salt thinks that ignoring their internal and external clients is good business.

I don't trust someone else to be in my work email inbox

Puh-lease. It's work email. Don't you know every boss and IT person is in there? Sit up straight with your work messaging. Don't want me to see it? Don't do it. Easy peasy.

Leaders: What you say and how fast you say it reflects on you as a leader. Take more time to answer an email. More time = allowing wisdom to kick in.