Project Stakeholder Management

Email is a great help when communicating with our project stakeholders. There are, however, some limitations of the email format that can cause our messages to be misinterpreted, often leading to conflict.

I’ve been wondering why emails can be the cause of conflict, and can offer these comments:

Much research has shown that success in communications involves three components:

• The message (comprised of the words you use)
• Your ‘body-language’ (body movements and gestures)
• The tonality of your voice (acoustic patterns including tone, pitch, and accent)

The relative importance of words / body language / tonality, are open to debate but it is clear that all of them do play a part in the messages we send. Email, of course, does not allow any body language or tone at all, relying solely on the words. Missing out these important parts of a communication can increase the chances of a mis-communication or mis-interpretation to occur.

But why?

Many years ago we relied on formal type-written reports and seemed to get less conflict than now. Perhaps this is because the formal report does not allow for any emotion, and is read for it’s content alone. Email is different, as the reader seems to assume a body language and tone to match the content, perhaps due to the informal ‘conversational’ style of the medium. If a reader makes the wrong assumption, then our message gets distorted and incorrectly received.

I once received an email from our company secretary asking for my size preference for a new company t-shirt. I saw the opportunity for some office humour by sending the shortest possible email, and replied only with the letter ‘L’ (for my t-shirt size). I was very proud at having sent the world’s shortest email but later noticed that our secretary seemed upset and would not talk to me. After a while I discovered that the secretary assumed I was in such a hurry that I could not be bothered to give a proper reply, and was somehow ‘looking-down’ on her. So my attempt at dry humour ended up generating conflict. Lacking any emotional content, the secretary inserted her own content and acted accordingly. If this is what a single-letter email can achieve, just imagine what damage can be caused by longer and more involved email correspondence!

My recommendation for one-to-one conversations is to simply pick up the phone as a preference to email. Ask yourself why you want to use email in this case?

Here are three tips for the use of email:

1. Limit the number of people you copy an email to. Copying a huge list of people can be interpreted as political games. And you may be surprised to learn that some people auto-delete any emails that have been copied to them, to ensure they only get relevant information.
2. Don’t use ‘bcc‘ ( an email option where people can be copied without the recipient being aware). Once people know that you use it, they won’t trust you fully. Why are you hiding something?
3. Think carefully about any ‘out-of-office’ auto-reply that you use. The auto-reply might be sending a message that your schedule is more important than the customer’s needs. Have someone monitor your email, or use a remote-access device.

Words, tonality and body language are the only means we have to relate our individual understandings, experiences and feelings. Let’s continue to place equal emphasis on all three avenues of communication.