Sometimes you can turn a great working relationship into a broken one over email.
Think about how many emails you exchange with your partners at work. Take, for example, the last fifty emails you’ve sent your right hand person (if you have one). If you isolated them, and just read what you wrote, should you be proud?
I challenge you to audit the last fifty emails you’ve sent to a trusted business partner. Read them for tone, intension, friendliness, reasonableness and crypticness. Imagine you received them, all in a pile over just a week or so. How would you feel? Are you coming across as a coach or a dictator?
If you do this exercise, you’ll realize that email is really a poor way to say no or talk about emotionally charged things. The phone truly the next best thing to being there.
I’m taking pre-orders for my DVD on email etiquette:
Dirty Dozen Rules Of Email Etiquette
