Over the course of my career, I have fired off my share of angry letters and e-mail. However, I cannot think of a single time when these communiques had a positive effect. Usually, they only served to escalate the conflict and alienate the recipient.
Several years ago, I wrote a fourteen-page diatribe to a business associate. I skewered him. I was right. He was wrong. And I had the proof.
I laid it out in meticulous detail. I prosecuted my case like a lawyer before the bar. I sent it off with fire in my eyes and a healthy does of self-satisfaction in my heart. That’ll show him, I thought.
I eagerly waited for his response. After a few weeks, I still hadn’t heard a word. So I re-read the letter and was embarrassed. My response was way out of proportion to the stimulus that provoked it. While I was technically right, I was relationally wrong. I never should have sent the letter. I regretted that I had acted so childishly.
Thankfully, the recipient never did respond to the letter—ever. The next time I saw him (several months later), he embraced me and acted like nothing had ever happened. That day, I got a little taste of grace. I also purposed that I would never send another letter like that. I had dodged a bullet.
In any relationship, you are going to experience times when you feel angry. It happens at home, at work, at church, and in countless other situations.
Next time it happens to you, I suggest you do the following:
- Cool down. Put some space between the stimulus and the response. Little offenses look much bigger the closer you are to them. If you let a little time pass, you will see them in their proper context and respond appropriately. This is what makes you different from the animals. You have the choice—the freedom—to chose how you will respond.
- Talk it out. I have a lot of close business associates and friends whom I trust. They are committed to saving me from myself. My wife, Gail, is, of course, the best. She helps me regain my perspective and gently asks, “Now, what are you really trying to accomplish here?” This is a great question which helps me consider the bigger picture.
- Write a response. If you want to write an angry e-mail, do it. Just don’t send it. I often do this, and it helps me process my feelings. It also helps me get a grip on reality. One word of caution: don’t fill in the “To:” field in the e-mail. I have seen people accidently hit the “Send” button and regret it. Instead, write it and save it as a draft. After you have cooled down, you can delete it.
- Do your homework. Sometimes you think you are right, but upon further investigation, you may discover that you contributed to the problem or aggravated the situation. The question I increasingly like to ask is this: What was it in my leadership that contributed to this outcome? This helps me move from being the victim to being an active participant in finding a solution.
- Schedule a meeting. I recently heard John Eldredge make the point that it’s easy to be brave when you are sitting in the safety of your own office. You can hurl digital spears at your adversaries without without the risk of a real, live encounter. But confronting people face-to-face—or even over the telephone—is a different matter. That takes real guts. But it can also lead to real solutions. The real question is whether we want to merely make a point or solve the problem.
- Admit your mistakes. If you slip up and send off an angry e-mail or letter, then acknowledge it. I will never forget getting an angry e-mail from one of our authors. He lambasted one of our VPs, going into great detail about how he had screwed up an important project. Unfortunately, he unintentionally copied the VP in the e-mail. Oops. Once he realized it, he was mortified. With great humility, he called the VP, admitted that he was way out of line, and then asked his forgiveness. Then he sent a formal apology to each of us. We took the time to rebuild the relationships and, in the process, further endeared himself to us.
As long as we have to deal with people, we are going to be disappointed, get frustrated, and react in anger. But we have to know how to channel these emotions in productive ways. Sending an e-mail or writing a letter is almost never the appropriate or most effective way. If you get angry, resist the temptation to respond in anger.
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Mike,
Another excellent and very true post. I’ve deleted many an angry email.
Rachel
So true, Mike. Reminds me of my worst email mistake: A freelancer was known for being high-maintenance. She sent a request and I forwarded it on to someone who could provide what she needed with a snide comment about ‘yet another request’. But what I’d actually done was REPLY to her. Oops, indeed. She handled it very gracefully, I apologized profusely and learned a very valuable lesson. Best policy with email: Never write anything you wouldn’t stand up and say to a room full of your colleagues. I follow that pretty closely, but I could definitely do better. Thanks for the reminder.
Mike,
Another great post…I have grown to appreciate your writing…keep it up! Here is a rule I “learned” in my early twenties and have regretted every violation of it since: Praise in print. Critize in person.
Simple rule. Great results.
Thanks for your leadership.
John Jackson
http://www.pastorpreneur.com
Wise, Wise advice…. I pray that I will heed it when the time comes.
Great post, Mike! And so true. And speaking of email, are you still only checking it twice a day? After your post about that, I decided I’d try cutting back to checking once an hour. Um, it only lasted two days. LOL After all, I was afraid I’d be late getting a fun email from my Nelson family! I’m so lame.
Wonderful post! This is so true! And learning to say “I’m sorry” is truly one of the greatest blessings we have! Thanks for this terrific reminder of grace!
Another home run Mike of basic civility and courtesy our world seems to be loosing. Everything is moving faster than we can keep up. Talk radio has a way of stirring the pot and people seem to be sitting on ready for a response.
I recently wrote a hand written letter to the publisher of the Tennessean newspaper about an on line feature they now have, involving a person by allowing a response to a story just read. Well if the story is emotion driven like say a Mary Winkler murder case, many emotionally charged people jumped in with the energy and drama of a Nancy Grace trying her in their own court. Perhaps the next day after hearing more of the story moods would have been toned out. But by then, the comments were in print. It was published.
But your excellent commentary today is a reminder we risk being “baited” from many sources daily, not just emails, and one thing we know…everybody has an opinion.
Mike,
This was a good reminder for me today. I work for a non-profit organization, and in the last week, I have been getting some pretty mean e-mails from irate critics. My flesh says “fire back.” So far, I have been able to control the urge, and your post is encouragement to type lightly. Thanks!
Omgaan met e-mail
E-mail neemt meer en meer van onze tijd in beslag. Spamfilters houden verder niet alles tegen, tot ieders ongenoegen. Schattingen geven aan dat meer dan 90% spammail is) Ander lastig emailgedrag is de groeps-cc. Vooral populair bij organi…
As stated above, criticism or conflict is best done in person whenever possible.
For e-mails that could be misinterpreted, I use three practices:
1. I write my e-mail in a text editor, then paste it into the mail program.
2. I use “Forward” instead of “Reply” so I am very conscious of who it’s going to – keeping in mind how easy it will be for them to forward it.
3. I complete the “to:” field last, so that I don’t accidentally send a partially completed e-mail.
While this has prevented me from sending flammable e-mail, it hasn’t prevented me from shooting my mouth off when I should have kept it shut.
Excellent reminder for all us hot heads out here :-).
Step #1, “Cool Down” is perhaps the single most important. It’s amazing what just 24 hours will do.
I wrote about this is more detail some time ago:
http://www.tamingemail.com/count_to_10_to_100_to_1000_if_you_have_to.html
Great post. My personal policy is simply to leave a draft open on any controversial email/response for at least 15 minutes before sending. Many times I might even send it to trustworthy individuals for a look. At that point I then re-evaluate it and resend.
It’s also helpful to wait up to an hour, read your draft email to them (before sending), then re-read the original email you’re responding to (or vice versa).
Once you put it out there, you can’t retract it – even more so true than when you say something.
Posted here:
http://lifehacker.com/software/personal-relationships/why-you-shouldnt-send-that-angry-email-301394.php
Define “angry.” I find that sometimes you have to be stern in your language if you are dealing with people who are being difficult or unfair.
While I don’t recommend profanity, name-calling or being an overly-detailed jacka**, there are times when you do need to push back. The trick, I think, is to acknowledge your own foibles while holding the other side accountable for his or hers.
Plus for some people a carefully-worded, yet angry email is better than a conversation because it gives them time to pause, think, read, and edit.
I, for example, am horrible at keeping my cool in person. My face gives away my inner thoughts, often without me realizing it. I’m also far more likely to take a defensive posture or have an angry tone in person.
E-mail on the other hand takes time to write — which means time to think. And it has the mixed blessing of removing troublesome body language from the conversation.
The best practice i have seen is to actually write the email and save it as a draft. Let yourself cool down for a couple hours then re-read the email to make sure its appropriate.
Sometimes just writing it out lets out enough frustration that you will be satisfied.
Excellent article. I was thinking shortly before seeing you article that I need to stress in my presentations that reactionary e-mails always backfire. Thanks!
it’s a very bad idea, I wish all my emails from Gmail were delayed by a few hours or so; that way I can make sure I mean what I’m sending, rather than having my judgement clouded in a veil of red mist.
Anger manifests itself in many ways,
email, road rage, relationships, etc.
Any of these situations might become volatile in the moment. When the moment has passed we are usually a little better at dealing with the situation. All of these moments are very hard to take back afterwards.
yes, been there, done that. How to avoid sending, THEN thinking? I do this (using MS Outlook): define a rule which applies to all outgoing messages, delaying sending them for x minutes (I’m experimenting with what works best for me at the moment – I started at 10, then went down to 5). Of course, this also delays all the messages that are OK to go out immediately, but most messages are not really so important they need to go out NOW.
Fourteen pages sure is a lot. It’s a miracle the guy didn’t respond to it. Anyway, I’m glad to have read this entry. Your insight is really helpful, especially since you know what it feels like to be really angry at someone. Not filling in the To button is a precaution I always do. You never know when your mouse will accidentally stray and hit the send button. This has happened to me so many times in the past (not necessarily with email)– that I have unconsciously sent messages I did not intend to. And you posed a very important point: We have to look at the situation clearly and ask ourselves if we have in any way contributed to the matter at hand.
It was just the types of problems mentioned in this post which got me thinking about if there might be a way to protect us all from hitting the hair-trigger send button and regreting it seconds later. The result was a solution I named YankBack, which is a web service I’ve settup to give people a bit of insurance against sending out regretable emails. http://www.yankback.com
Murray Mintz
President, YankBack, Inc.
I you are so right. Personally, I don’t ever hold back, especially when I KNOW I’m right. September last year I had this row with some broad at AVG antivirus. I wrote her this:
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/268/angrymailtp0.jpg
Good advice. People sometimes read sarcasm even when it isn’t there. I’ve even minced my words ad nauseam only to still get an angry reply. However, one thing that got me into trouble more than writing back to the offending author was complaining about them to somebody ELSE (can you believe this idiot), who then in turn forwarded my critical e-mail to the offending author. I try to never type anything I wouldn’t say to the person face to face.
I work online and me and my colleagues communicate solely by email with people from HQ and each other. Communication in general leaves a lot to be desired and we generally work in a vacuum. So you can just imagine how easy it is for things to go awry. Recently I sent an angry email (not personal, just whining about HQ’s bad attitudes to us workers) to both my supervisor and my supervisor’s supervisor, in response to a major policy change announced out of the blue by the latter without any consultation whatsoever. My supervisor’s supervisor set up a meeting with me personally. I didn’t email my supervisor about this and now the you-know-what has totally hit the fan. Now my supervisor things I’m a sneaky rat who’s gone over her head, which I guess is kinda true but I never even thought it would be taken like that! I just sent a couple of quick emails without really thinking about them :( I totally hate and loathe email these days. It’s just not human.
Thanks Mike for your honesty and for this reminder appropriate for every single one of us. It reminds me of the topic of Deborah Norville's new book, "The Power of Respect." in which she calls respect "the grease that lubricates the wheels of society." It seems to be MIA in many aspects of life today. Seems we all should be on a campaign to bring it back! Thanks for this post that moves us in that direction.