Sunday, June 5, 2016

Executive vs Associates Emails

This comic was not so interesting until I read the comments. What I found so interesting is how quickly everyone jumped onto the idea that the ideal email is to be brief and to the point.

Yes, that the associate email is a bit lengthy but there is no way they could get by with the executive message. The lengthy version is very much the safer route than being too brief for an associate.

People should know their audience even among peer-to-peer messages. Some people need to have the flowery-words, and some people don't. Some people are easily offended if not enough proper respect is included in the email. And quite easily, someone like an executive gets thousands of emails and simple message of "please see below" will be quickly forgotten (intentionally or not).

Even for such a message from an executive, I have listened to many colleagues confused on what the message even meant in the first place. What thoughts? Grammar? Content? New idea? On every single bullet point or a subjective top 10 list? You're the executive what did you not like about that email?

It saddens me that even the experienced professionals make such simple, over-simplified comments. Yes, some messages could be more brief and some could be more descriptive. Most messages need to be tailored not only by who it is written to but also the author's experience/rank.


https://image-store.slidesharecdn.com/8b670d02-0525-40e8-9d57-735086deefdf-original.png

No comments:

Post a Comment