I joined the corporate world back in 2000. I started working in a small affiliate of a very large PR group. We still did daily monitoring reading and clipping newspapers (pause for astonishment), which we would then scan and send to clients. Although dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, email already existed but it looked like a screen-flickering typewriter, in a sea of blue, black, and white.
After a 6-month internship, my manager found my writing mature enough and adequately formal to engage with clients on my own. That’s when he told me about the famous expression, the “shit sandwich”. It went something like this: “When in disagreement, make sure you start the email (or live discussion) with something positive, then you say what you actually want to say – the negative bit – and then you finish like you started, with something positive, so people feel less offended.”
Although I understood the logic behind the advice and the importance of ending on a positive note, I found it all rather deceiving and inherently unkind. I went through university witnessing the benefit of clear is kind: start by saying what you want to say and then explain your rationale. You can disagree but do it kindly. You can even go a little rowdy, but always check in with your heart at the end: “Did you see the entire situation from everyone’s point of view?”.
I was confident in my writing (loved the cockiness of my 20s) to know that even if I avoided this widely endorsed approach to speaking to people, I’d do well. So, I went for it. Not all conversations were great, and not all emails were as clear as I wanted them to be, but one thing was certain. I never wrote any email, letter, position paper, or business plan that did not consider the audience’s needs or their emotions when they read it. My “pen” was and still is guided by the following four principles:
1. Leave your mind for a moment and inhabit the readers’: try to understand the audience’s needs, wishes, and concerns. Address their questions with empathy, even if empathy is not shown to you (there’s a component of politeness here too).
2. Focus on finding solutions: who doesn’t like solutions? Take your time to acknowledge the situation or context, but don’t overly dwell on it. Move to identifying solutions in a concise manner which can then be discussed or worked on in detail through other channels, not necessarily in writing.
3. Be aware of the linguistic context of the organization: are you using expressions that have been blacklisted or are associated with less positive experiences either by employees or customers? Trusted co-workers can often check if the reader will “cringe” after reading “synergies” or “right-sizing” in your first paragraph.
4. Write. Leave it to simmer: and then edit. Do it again, a bit more. Not only is clear kind, but concise is kinder. You want people to get the full picture of what you’re saying but they don’t need it all. You are competing with thousands of emails, texts, pings, calls. Don’t rush (which is unkind) but don’t go verbose either.
Bonus principle: if you’re in doubt that someone in the audience won’t understand “verbose”, don’t use it. You want people to get the message, not feel excluded.
Photo credit: Mae Mu