These days, it’s much more normal to start a “conversation” with colleagues and clients or to bring up an issue with them through an email rather than a phone call. Emails are great for creating a paper trail, and their convenience is hard to beat, but their drawbacks are often overlooked. And good old phone calls have a lot going for them.
Writing for the Harvard Business Review, the venture capitalist Anthony Tjan makes a good case for using the phone and face-to-face meetings much more frequently, especially “when people are trying to resolve a conflict or communicate an important business decision.”
This isn’t the easy path: it may be “easier, quicker, less stressful, and less confrontational to have critical or challenging issues sent over email versus a live one-on-one,” he says, but it can be a bad tradeoff: emails and similar methods often “prolong debate,” sometimes forever. It’s very hard to know when something’s resolved for good, and getting an email’s tone right can be tricky.
The comments for Tjan’s post are also worth a scan; they include people complaining that they would talk on the phone if they could ever get through, as well as some additional telephonic advice, e.g., “I have a rule in my group that if it takes two emails and you still can’t resolve the issue, pick your *#$# up and go see them.”
Feel free to share the methods you use to communicate — including those that seem to work the best in your industry.
[Photo: Andres Rueda/Flickr]
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