Never Write What You Wouldn’t Read Aloud To Your Coworkers

There's Very Little Upside and a Whole Lot of Downside

Years ago, I was working as a product manager on a team that had serious trust issues. Engineering didn’t trust the product team, the product team didn’t trust engineering, UX felt sidelined and ignored, and the project was behind schedule.

My boss sent out an email to me and the other members of the team asking for a status update on our projects. I responded with an update on what I perceived as failures on the part of my engineering partners. I wasn’t extremely harsh, but I also wasn’t very charitable.

Then my boss accidentally forwarded my response to the wider team. Not only did my engineering team see what I’d written, but so did everyone else. Ooops.

In less than 10 minutes later, my skip-level boss corralled me, my boss, and our engineering leaders into a room. The truth of what I’d written wasn’t material. It highlighted the bad faith in the team’s working relationships and made me look mean spirited and incompetent.

I apologized without reservation and in-person to everyone affected. I took my engineering team out to get drinks and paid the tab. Through the good grace of my coworkers and a willingness to forgive, we were able to move forward and ship the product.

But the whole incident should have never happened. I learned a painful and powerful lesson that day: you should never write down what you wouldn’t say in person to a coworker. Better still, whenever you are at work and you write something, before you send it, imagine if you would be comfortable standing up in front of your entire business group and reading your words. If you feel a tinge of embarrassment, don’t send it.

You Can’t Communicate Directly At Work?

At this point, you might be tempted to react with concern about blunt and honest communication. If you can’t write down anything negative about any coworkers ever, how can productive work be done? Surely, a bit of conflict is good for every team, right?

Absolutely. In fact, I think that having negative conversations with coworkers is one of the most important skills that you can develop in your career. But you should still never write down those words because written communication doesn’t communicate intent clearly.

Humans have a bunch of ways to communicate information. There’s tone, body language, inflection, verbal emphasis, appearance, facial expression, and then the actual words you use. Without these other forms of communication, words can be easily misinterpreted. Even if you have something negative to say, there are ways to communicate that information without necessarily causing offense. Here’s an example.

The Worst Meeting

I spent the first 7 years of my career running two of my own startups with my best friends. We were all college friends and the companies remained small, which is to say that I avoided learning a bunch of necessary corporate skills.

I got my first “real” job after leaving my second company in 2015. I was hired as the PM for mobile products at a now-defunct SF-based real estate startup. A couple weeks into the job, I organized a meeting with my boss and our user research lead. I thought the meeting went okay, but afterwards, our research lead pulled me aside.

“Could I give you some constructive feedback, George?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“I think that was the worst meeting I’ve ever attended. Could I give you some pointers about how to run meetings in a more effective way?”

My first reaction was to be offended. I was an experienced startup founder. I’d built two profitable businesses in my career already, who was she to tell me I wasn’t good at organizing a meeting!? But - and here’s the critical part - she delivered those words with such empathy and concern that I not only said yes, but I listened patiently while she listed all the ways my meeting sucked.

In hindsight, my meeting organization skills did suck and she was right to call me out. To this day, I use the tools that she taught me to run more effective meetings. I’m thankful that she addressed her feedback directly to me rather than writing a nasty email to my boss.

Recap

Never write down what you wouldn’t read aloud to your coworkers. Not only does it protect you from painfully embarrassing missteps, but it pushes you to behave like my coworker and improve the performance of those around you.