Very helpful, albeit long, article from the New York Times about a
method of communication we rely on heavily in Collab.
Bottom Line: Be sure to have a personal, friendly relationship with
team members whom you e-mail. Without personal knowledge, we run the
risk of being misunderstood and miscommunicating.
Kimberly A. Schavey
Kimberly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Begin forwarded message:
From: "J.J. McVeigh" <kd4vs@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 10, 2007 5:36:35 PM MDT
To: MacLaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [MacLaw] E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)
Reply-To: MacLaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://tinyurl.com/36dcn8>
====
The New York Times
October 7, 2007
Preoccupations
E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)
By Daniel Goleman
AS I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into
print, an employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail
message that stopped me in my tracks.
I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail
exchange about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which
I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: "It's difficult
to have this conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound
exasperated."
At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once
she identified this snag in our communications, I realized that
something had really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared
everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.
The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly
greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which
e-mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.
This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social
neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as
they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the
interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no
online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate
emotions.
Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We
interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial
expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as
their synchronization with what we do and say.
Most crucially, the brain's social circuitry mimics in our neurons
what's happening in the other person's brain, keeping us on the same
wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport
that arises from an enormous number of parallel information
processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.
In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be
emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add
nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the
rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.
E-mail, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it's quick and
convenient, democratizes access and lets us stay in touch with loads
of people we could never see or call. It enables us to accomplish
huge amounts of work together.
Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel
for the brain's emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to
be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin
Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's
Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases
the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.
One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail
messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the
sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients
than by senders.
We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according
to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail,
the sender internally "hears" emotional overtones, though none of
these cues will be sensed by the recipient.
When we talk, my brain's social radar picks up that hint of stridency
in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation,
all in the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail,
there's little to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up.
E-mail lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a
conversation, provide its positive or negative spin.
On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and
receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by
Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at
Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns
out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online.
These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, an
adjunct professor in New York University's interactive
telecommunications program. His expertise is social computing -
software programs through which multiple users interact, ranging from
Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms to e-mail. I asked Professor
Shirky what all of this might imply for the multitudes of people who
work with others by e-mail.
"When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic
channels, it's like having functional Asperger's Syndrome - you are
very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle," Professor Shirky
said.
"I'm part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was
designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked
mostly by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So
we finally said we'd all fly to Boston and get together for two days,
just sit in a room and hash it out."
During that meeting, the team got an enormous amount of work done.
And, Professor Shirky recalls, "because the synchronization by e-mail
was so much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the
launch date."
He proposes that work groups whose members are widely dispersed but
need to have high levels of coordination - say, a computer security
team protecting a global bank - do not have to assemble everyone in
one room to reap the same benefit. Instead, he suggests a "banyan
model," after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.
In this approach, he said, "you put down little roots of face-to-face
contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic
communications."
Professor Shirky advised the I.T. head of a global bank to gather
together one representative from disparate cities for a day or two
and complete tasks. That way, when the security group in Singapore
gets e-mail from the security people in London, someone will be more
likely to know the sender, and sense how to read the information with
less risk of misconstruing or discounting it.
CONSIDER, too, the "e-mail the guy down the hall" effect: as the use
of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other
kinds of communication drops - particularly routine friendly
greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people
feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article
in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was
starting to surge. Saying "Hi," it turns out, really does matter;
it's social glue.
As Professor Shirky puts it, "social software" like e-mail "is not
better than face-to-face contact; it's only better than nothing."
Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science
of Human Relationships" (Bantam). E-mail: preoccupations@xxxxxxxxxxx.
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