When I was younger, and greener, I got myself into a few email battles.
The proper ones. The kind where your hands are almost shaking while you type the reply because you’re so completely convinced you’re right.
You go back over every sentence, making sure the argument is watertight, then hit Send.
A reply comes back and off you go again.
There’s usually a little voice somewhere telling you this probably isn’t the best way to deal with it. Unfortunately, there’s another voice saying, “Yeah, but you should see what this idiot just wrote.”
That one can be louder.
The problem is that once you’re properly into an email battle, I think you’ve already lost. Even if you’re right.
Actually, especially if you’re right, because that makes it much harder to walk away.
I learned this more slowly than I probably should have.
Part of the problem with email is obvious. You know what tone you intended when you wrote something. The other person doesn’t.
The perfectly reasonable sentence you wrote can arrive sounding sarcastic. The firm response can read as aggressive. The carefully constructed rebuttal that proves beyond doubt that you are correct can just make you look like a bit of a dick.
Then their reply comes back with a little more edge. You notice, yours gets a little more edge, and suddenly you’re not really trying to solve anything anymore.
You’re trying to win.
There’s another problem too. An email rarely stays exactly where you sent it.
Forwarding takes about two seconds.
The person you’re arguing with forwards the thread to their manager. Their manager forwards it to yours. Somebody adds another person “for awareness”. Before long, people you never intended to involve are reading an exchange written when both sides were pissed off.
I have a simple test for this now.
If I’d be uncomfortable with my boss — or their boss — reading the entire thread, I probably shouldn’t send the email.
Not because senior people are going to carefully study both sides and decide who won. More likely they’ll look at two people having a ridiculous fight over email and wonder why neither of them managed to sort it out.
That’s easy to miss when you’re in the middle of one. You’re concentrating on whether you’re right. Somebody reading it from the outside may be forming an opinion about how you deal with conflict.
So when you find yourself writing that email, stop for a bit.
Go make coffee. Do something else. Come back to it.
Quite often the email that felt absolutely necessary twenty minutes ago looks a bit different.
And if the thread has already started going bad, pick up the phone. Get on a call. Go and talk to the person if you can.
I know. Sometimes you really don’t want to.
Do it anyway.
You can say in five minutes on a call what will take another twelve increasingly hostile emails to not resolve.
That doesn’t mean giving in. Sometimes the other person is wrong. Sometimes they’re being unreasonable. Sometimes you genuinely need to hold your ground.
You can do all of that without trying to win the argument by email.
And if you still think they’re an arsehole afterwards, that’s fine too.
You just don’t have to put it in writing.