In a meeting this morning, a client described a protracted conflict with some of his board members and how they would communicate with him in multiple-page e-mails (at least one was sent at 2 am on a Sunday morning!). These e-mails included attacks and criticisms that crossed the line, at least from my client’s (and my own) perspective.
In this age of electronic communication—e-mail, text messaging, Twitter, etc.—I think that people are trying to do too much electronically—and too little face-to-face.
When it comes to clearing the air with someone, e-mail and memos simply don’t cut it. You’ve got to talk face-to-face.
It’s pretty common, though, that when the conversation gets tough, when there is conflict, people want to protect themselves. And, an easy way to do that is to send one-way messages rather than risk a two-way conversation.
Unfortunately, doing that only makes things worse, because those one-way communication tools have very limited bandwidth. You can’t see their gestures, you can hear their tone of voice or even tell if they care. You can’t show you understand, and neither can they.
To have a productive conversation and actually resolve a problem, you need a lot of bandwidth—and that only comes in a face-to-face meeting.
You’d need to do what one of my coaching clients did a few weeks back. He had a very unpleasant exchange with a colleague in the hallway. Talking with me, he took a step back, looked at the situation from a different angle, and made a plan to approach his colleague for a one-on-one chat. It went very well—even better than expected.
If you want to perpetuate a conflict, retreating to one-way communication works well. If you want to resolve the problem, there’s no getting around talking face-to-face.
