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.” |