Quandary Mat: Email Drama

Dear Hunter, 

I have a colleague who is always causing drama over email. I realized today that I avoid opening emails from her. It’s that bad. 

If I email her about something, she replies like she’s read a totally different email from the one I sent, and cc’s 15 people with a defensive or even abusive message back to me. Even though I know she likes me and she seems to think I’m good at my job. It makes me look bad and it’s exhausting. She does this to other people, too.

I don’t know if she enjoys causing drama, or is just bad at expressing herself in writing. She complained to me last week about “all these extra meetings.” Then I realized that many of the extra meetings are the result of her bad email habits!

What can I do to help her be more appropriate and productive in email? She’s stressing me out and wasting a lot of people’s time.

Signed, Stop the Email Drama

Dear Drama, 

Yep, this is a thing that happens. Reactive and inappropriate emailing is a disruptive waste of time and energy. It damages relationships. And it makes us loathe to check our messages, as is the situation for you.

I don’t know this person, so I can’t guess what’s going on in her head that has her acting this way. One thing you have going for you, from the way you tell it: she seems to be oblivious to the impacts of her bad emailing habit. There’s opportunity there to help her see her drama-queen behavior, and to see it as bad for her, for you, and for others. 

There’s an emotional regulation aspect here that isn’t yours to manage, but that I want to acknowledge. We all have our reactive moments. She’s not a bad person, just a person with a bad habit. Who emails at moments when she should be leaving her keyboard alone.

Email is tricky. Its benefits are also its main problems: 

• Email is quick, which makes it easy to be reactive in the moment. 

• Email allows us to involve a whole bunch of people, like your colleague is doing.

• Email can provide the illusion of having achieved something, just by hitting “send.”

Since you say that she likes you, when the next drama-email comes to you, I suggest you approach your colleague directly, not by email, and tell her the impact her email had on you: anger, confusion, frustration, anxiety, whatever. (I like the SBI feedback model, which I have posted about on LinkedIn in the past.) 

Tell her what created this frustration/confusion/whatever: “You cc’d 10 people instead of just replying to me,” or “You seemed like you were angry about my decision.” 

Then give her the floor, with a supportive question to focus her on the impacts of her action. Something like, “Can you tell me what you wanted to get out of sending that message?” 

This question will help her see the cause and effect in play here. What you want to do is to help her see the chaos, loss of trust, and extra work her behavior is causing. That is the first step in her finding a better way to communicate with you and others. 

You can explain what you think email is for (a few notes below from my perspective), and what you expect in the future, like “I hope that when you have a question for me in the future, you will come to me to ask me directly instead of sending an email to a bunch of people.” 

I bet that this one conversation will help her start to see how her reactive dramatic email style is harming more than her relationship with you (without you pointing that out; you should focus on just your own experience and needs). And start to pause before she sends the next email. 

I also imagine that one chat won’t change her behavior overnight. It takes a lot for a reactive person to learn to regulate themselves better. And again, email is just so so easy! You should be prepared to have that difficult conversation with her again. Just the fact that you are asking for her time outside of the speed of email to talk about her emails is a helpful disruption to this pattern. 

Good luck! 

A few thoughts on what email is good for, and not 

Email is best for simple transactions: scheduling, asking somebody to review a document, providing a simple unambiguous update (“She said okay, so now it’s time for us to do the thing.”) 

The best emails are short and include only what the recipient needs to know to take the next step or give a binary response (yes/no, go/no-go, chicken/fish/veggie).

Email is not good for … pretty much anything else. Tone is totally absent. Subtlety is lost.