Last week one of my clients asked for help on a thorny problem that had escalated from annoying to serious since we’d last met. The inciting incident was an e-mail – the latest salvo in a long and unpleasant thread. We needed to respond.
We spent the first hour of our session discussing the situation in detail – his history with the other two people on the thread, the power dynamics, the e-mails and meetings that had taken place so far, the actions he’d taken outside of the e-mail chain, what other advice he’d gotten about the situation – everything!
We spent the second hour getting clear about two important and separate things – his objectives and his feelings. Once my client recognized his emotions and put them out of the way, we engaged our brains to talk about what he really wanted. Equally importantly we talked about what he could directly control, what he could subtly influence, and what he could neither control nor influence. We then made a decision tree looking at all of his options and the likely outcomes. We created contingency plans.
After two hours of discussion, we were ready. We went back to the offending e-mail and read it aloud. At that point the right response was perfectly clear. A short, two sentence e-mail was all that was needed. There was no need to dignify the sender’s offending paragraphs with a response. Ignoring something offensive is often the most powerful response there is!
My client wrote a short, clear, upbeat e-mail. And the recipient wrote back in seven minutes offering what my client had wanted for months.
I’m always saying that what I do for a living is help leaders become great communicators. I spent decades in PR, where people think communication simply means ‘talking to reporters’ or ‘giving speeches’. But there’s so much more.
Shrewd, successful communication is the most vital business tool I know. In any situation. To achieve any business objective. There’s nothing I love more than helping a talented, innovative person become a master communicator – whether we’re writing a two sentence e-mail or a major speech!
