How Emotionally Charged Intellect Vanishes Within E-Mail
D. Margolis; 11/8/10

L&D pros in agencies of all sorts have endeavored to create emotionally charged intellect in their leadership, but this could soar out the window when individuals talk through e-mail.

Emotional intellect is certainly a hot subject amongst behavior specialists to understand how folks identify, evaluate and control their emotions. In recent years, it’s become increasingly buzzed about by learning and improvement experts like a quality necessary to the success of business leaders — and one they might not recognize they need.

Travis Bradberry is the author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and the co-founder of TalentSmart, a consultancy which offers emotional intelligence (EQ) tests and training. “We invest a great deal of time studying EQ and just how it connects to things such as job performance, and often we find ourselves knee-deep within the problems that people experience at the office, where emotional intelligence plays a big part,” he stated.

In working with businesses on emotionally charged intelligence, TalentSmart has found a particular need in this space: emotionally intelligent e-mailing. Bradberry noted that businesses of all shapes and sizes are requesting help with this.

“Everyone’s had the e-mail exchange which they rue or made their own skin crawl,” Bradberry mentioned. “Let’s simply assert it wasn’t just one consumer request that resulted in this. We’ve studied more than half a million people today, looking at their emotional intelligence and their work performance, and it’s just a common issue that comes up over and over in our training course as something people want to talk about because it’s a challenge for them.”

According to Bradberry, the largest fall people make in e-mailing is not considering the way the recipient of the e-mail may respond when she or he views it. “The one thing that people often lose sight of very quickly is the viewpoint of the other individual,” he explained. “We’re so focused on what we have to declare and how we’re going to say it that we all lose sight of the way the message will likely be received. Whenever you’re talking to someone in person it’s a little simpler to enter their shoes because you’re in fact watching them respond to that which you’re saying. But when you are looking at an e-mail, you've to imagine somebody sitting in front of their monitor, this message opening up and exactly what it’s like to interpret an e-mail message.”

Bradberry mentioned that one scenario TalentSmart has come around repeatedly is what should be strictly factual exchanges becoming emotional because they’re amplified using e-mail. “These types of situations will lead to tears many times,” he said. “The goal wasn’t to drive the person to tears; the actual goal was to be correct. But they get so caught up in the instant which they develop this particularly sententious, scathing e-mail. Once they view the damage it does, they rue moving around it this way.”

Why it's become more like an issue now, Bradberry pointed towards the expansion of cell phones that sync with e-mail, which has had the effect of individuals sending workplace e-mails on a nearly continuous basis. “Bandwidth on portable gadgets and also the interface on them have raised to the point that you can really shoot emails forwards and backwards and create something long on [them],” he said. “It’s simply created e-mail such a regular, common thing that people assume that that’s where they’re supposed to manage big challenges, simply because that’s exactly where they handle anything else. Ten years ago, if you wrote a scathing e-mail, you had been a responsible party for selecting to do this through e-mail, because much less conversation at work was carried out by an e-mail swap. Now everything occurs that way, so we’re really at the point where we’re disregarding to actually communicate either vocally or in person.”

Bradberry stated this can be a crucial trap of e-mail: people not recognizing when a discussion is so emotionally charged as to be unacceptable for e-mail. “There’s too much studying in to an e-mail it that can be done,” he said. “The content will end up muddied. Even though you’re generously obvious that you’re upset about a thing, you've just got no clue the way the other person’s responding to it and you have no power to process back and forth. When it’s time to get down to brass tacks, you need to do that face to face, or otherwise pick up the phone.”