Manage up: Effective Emailing

Your boss is busy, so informing via email is an important way to keep them in the loop. But they are SO busy that reading books isnt gonna happen. 

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast, Scaling Out.

Emails, some people hate them, some people live by them. If your organization uses emails, knowing how to communicate effectively is extremely important. There are etiquettes to follow – no upper case, don’t reply to all unless absolutely required, etc. But there are some unwritten rules, like don’t write a book. And when emailing your boss, and considering that your job is to make your manager’s life easy, knowing how to effectively summarize a request/update via email is critical.

One of my elective classes in college was technical communications and an important part of the class was learning how to write an executive summary. My current take is this is really the only way to email your boss & the only REASON to email your boss. 

First – Clearly communicate in the subject line what this is about. Don’t write ‘Update’ with no other context. Make it relevant & actionable. 

Second - Provide a summary of the request/status/update at the top of the email. This should be no more than 4 sentences. The shorter the better. If there is an ask – specifically spell it out. BUT DO NOT write a book. Remember the ask could be to have a meeting scheduled in the next day/week to detail out the approach, get feedback, answer questions.

Then - if additional information is required, summarize underneath. 

Finally - Provide external reference links at the end of the email, say to a larger document, project plan, contract or to an issue ticket & then summarize next to each link what the context that provides to the summary paragraph above. 

Of course, if your organization doesn’t use emails at all, or uses emails for everything – this might not work. But, I would recommend checking out Cal Newport’s recent book ‘The World Without Email’. As effectively planning around emails will be more critical for knowledge work & our productivity gains in the future.

Alright – that completes my managing up series. Hope you’ve enjoyed. 

Until next time, stay safe everyone!