Communication media profoundly influence how our messages are not only interpreted but the consequences of those messages. There's a story about a woman who is negotiating her job offer at Nazareth College. And what she done after she's been extended an offer, she decided to ask for some clarification and ask for some other concessions in an email. And she wrote, as you know I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier. So notice that she's not insisting on this. She's not saying I have to have all these things. She's saying some of these would make it easier. And she asks for things like increasing the starting salary, consistent with what she thinks all of you have been getting. A semester of maternity leave. A pre-tenure sabbatical, and so on. She asked for a few other things here, and I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think. Now, this is a relatively soft way of approaching things. I would suggest that had she done this in person, she'd be getting feedback along the way and she'd get a pretty clear sense of how things were going. The response that she got ended up withdrawing the offer. So here she had meant to ask for some things. And I'm going to suggest that, because it was an email, it came across, I think, more forcefully than she'd intended. And this electronic medium allowed her email to be shared and probably interpreted in different ways. So you could imagine somebody getting it, forwarding it on but forwarding it with a message at the top like, can you believe this? or this doesn't look right to me. And then building consensus in the department that ended up leading to the withdrawal of the offer. So here, this email exchange ended up in Disaster. Now on a quickly add there are many advantages to email and texting. The asynchronous nature of it mean we can send messages and don't have to be there at exactly the same time so we can multitask, we can take more time, we could gather more information. So the asynchronous characteristic has real advantages. It turns out to be more equal medium of communication. So if there are strong hierarchies people communicate more evenly in email. People can sometimes evade questions in ways that are good or bad, but Often more obvious when we look through the whole email exchange. We're revealing different and often less information, again all of those nonverbal cues are often absent. So humor for example, often doesn't go over very well in email. If it's sarcastic it's hard to know if it's Delivered in a sarcastic way or not. But it's also very easy medium to communicate with many people and also to keep a record. So there are lot of advantages to using email but some important disadvantages and a lot of this relates to the lack of richness in this communication. There's some media richness theory, that suggest we can order media to figure out how rich they are. And face to face is really the best. So, in face to face media, we end up communicating with people as completely as we can. We're most effective in communicating our messages And we're most effective reading other people. But face to face also allows us to do other things like engaging those haptics we talked about. So shaking somebody's hand or giving somebody an embrace, we can do things that allow us to build rapport that we cannot do without it. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't also use email we should but we might want to balance face to face meetings with email and sometimes replace some other meetings. Let's say it's through video conference, if we can, it still pays to get on the airplane and fly somewhere and meet face to face, that's important for building rapport in our relationships. It's particularly important when things are complicated. So if we go down this hierarchy there's face to face at the top. We can have video conference next. So video conference doesn't allow us to shake hands. But we can still gauge some non-verbal cues like facial cues. Telephone for example is less rich than that. But again we can still hear the pace and pitch and timing of somebody's words. Writing goes below that. We have voicemail, email, instant messaging, and those I'd put in a very special category because with these electronic messages, they're easily replicated and forwarded. So like that email to Nazareth College, you might end up with a message that gets forwarded, but sometimes with a preamble that we might not have intended. And so we want to be careful with these messages and write them or leave them as if we're expecting them to be broadcast. So we want to think about being very careful with those messages. So here are my prescriptions for e-mail. So avoid e-mail for sensitive matters. We want to write e-mail as if things are getting forwarded. So if we're concerned about being misunderstood, If we're concerned about navigating a tricky social relationship, like a new relationship with an employer, we want to be very careful because we're less likely to get to both communicate and receive feedback as we're communicating by e-mail. So, we might miss social conventions or not convey the empathy that we really mean to convey. We're communicating over a text media like email. So, if we're using email, we have to work at relationship building. We have to recognize that emails often appear more aggressive and more assertive than they really Meant to be, so it come across differently. So we have to soften our emails. We want to think about folding in some face to face meetings or getting up, leaving your office, walking down the hall to talk with somebody as well as emailing with them. And then finally again just to reiterate it because I feel so strongly about it. Write that email as if many people are going to see it.
