Email has made communication simpler and faster, but I’m not certain it has made us any more efficient.  Before email, I didn’t answer several hundred written notes a day from colleagues and management like I do now.  Routine matters were handled by telephone and very important issues were dealt with through memorandums and letters.   Now,  because everyone in an organization is connected instantly via email, employees often spend much of their day answering incredibly routine questions from their supervisors, questions that, before the inception of the internet, never would have been worth dialing a phone or walking down the hall to ask.

I had a boss at one point in the past whose office was about thirty feet down the hall from my own, separated by two other offices.  If he raised his voice and both of our doors were open I could hear him talking.  He could have called out from his desk (though thankfully he didn’t) and I would have walked down to see him.

One day he stuck his head in my door and asked “Did you get my email yet?”   We had been having some slow server problems, and I had not yet seen anything, so I said “No sir, the server must be slow again.”  He made a sort of “Hmmmpf” sound and walked away, clearly irritated.  I assumed he was irritated with the server.

Perhaps five minutes later he came back to my office and stuck his head in my office again.  “Did you get my email yet?”  I looked up to see him looking angry, and as I quickly moused over to open my inbox and check, I began to think what he could have sent me that needed such urgent attention.  “Is there some document you need me to review sir?  Perhaps you could print it out and I could look at it.”  “Read your email,” he said walking away with another strangled “Hrrmmmppf!”

Not ten minutes later he was back.  “Well?”  I had not closed down my inbox, but refreshed the screen and still had nothing.  “Sir, is there something you needed to discuss with me?” I asked.  “Wait for the eeeemail!”  he said, emphasizing the “e” in a manner that made me feel like he wasn’t really even sure how to pronounce it.

So frustrated by his multiple visits to my office and his unwillingness to just tell me what it was he wanted me to review or look into, I turned on the incoming mail chime which, for reasons most sane people understand, had been turned off since I first set up the account.  After a few minutes there was the repeated sound of the microsoft “chime” signaling the arrival of a number of emails, including the one from my boss.  The subject line read “Important.”  I quickly opened the email to find his message, concise and to the point: “please come see me.”

I counted to ten, took a deep breath and tried to keep the blood from rising to my face.  Knocking on his door (which he normally did not keep closed) I heard a faint “enter!” and went inside.  “Did you get my email?”  “Yes sir,” I said, “But I…”  “Good!” he said, “I wanted to ask your opinion on…”  I have no recollection of what he was talking about, or what was so urgent.  I was incredulous at the time.  “Sir, if you wanted to see me in your office, why didn’t you just ask me to come see you on one of your visits to my office?  Or call me, or send Mr. Golden (an assistant), or…I don’t know…just yell down the hall?”

“Well,” he said, “I shouldn’t have to do that.  I sent you an email.”  I was dumbfounded.

This drives me insane.  The belief by so many people in the workplace that, if they send an email, their task is complete.  You cannot lead an organization through emails.  You have to get out, see people, know what they are doing, interact with them.   You can’t just sit behind a screen, like the Wizard of Oz, trying to run things virtually.  Am I wrong to think this way?  Am I the only one who has suffered from E-leadership?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Life, The Multiverse, Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.