Know where you live and Respond vs. react

Published: Wed, 08/04/21

Dear ,

Welcome to this helping of "To Be Clear..." - a refreshing gulp of regular coaching clarity in your inbox where I share a couple of brief ideas which you can apply in your work life.

Since the last issue, it's been great to be featured by Enterprising Oxford as part of their Wonder Women series. Feel free to have a read.

After a few issues featuring tips and insights from the ONION coaching tool, this slightly longer issue looks at a key professional skill (responding to tricky emails) but, before that, a question for all of us to get clear on - especially as so many plan and take some well-deserved holiday...

Where Do You Live?

Wemmick’s Castle (from ‘Great Expectations’) by Edward Ardizzone (1952)

Anyone I coached over the pandemic will be familiar with my observation that many of us were not so much working from home as living at work. Pre-pandemic, even if we worked at home on the odd day or after supper (or even on holiday when things were especially busy), the distinction between work and home was relatively clear.

For many of us, 2020 not so much blurred those lines as obliterated them. Even if you were lucky enough to have a separate workspace at home (and many people weren't), for many of us work was there all the time, the ghost at every banquet, especially given how little else there was to do outside of our homes.

One of the most memorable characters in Charles Dickens's 1861 literary classic, Great Expectations, is John Wemmick, a legal clerk. When the book's protagonist, Pip, first visits Wemmick at his home, he discovers a completely different man from the one he's encountered at the office. "Castle Wemmick" - Wemmick's lovingly cultivated suburban cottage in what is now South East London - has its own drawbridge which symbolises how closely Wemmick protects his "real" life outside the office and Pip discovers that Home Wemmick is the exact opposite of cold, stiff Work Wemmick. Home Wemmick is a genial host, the life and soul of the party, a loving son and an ardent fiancé. Wemmick tells Pip that "the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me." And vice versa.

There's been much written in the last couple of years, about "bringing your whole self to work" and showing vulnerability in the workplace and, in many ways, I agree that it's good thing to behave authentically at work - one of the pillars of my coaching practice is integrity, helping clients to successfully align their practice at work with their personality and strengths.

However, I would suggest that work demands quite enough from us already without also demanding our "whole self" - that’s far too precious to give to our team or organisation or business, however committed we are to them. One of the joys of my work as a Business Coach, is that, as they achieve greater clarity and success at work, my clients are left with more headspace and bandwidth to focus on the things and relationships which really matter beyond their work and businesses.

A good question to ask yourself in the coming days might be: “What will it look like for me to intentionally maintain healthy boundaries between work and home in the next few weeks?”

The answer will look different for each of us. There's no need to go full Wemmick and build a mini-drawbridge or to adopt a dry, robotic work persona. However, it's definitely worth taking time to review how your work is fitting within your wider life and having a think about how that's changed and what you'd like it to look like going forward.

It may also be worth setting (and keeping) explicit boundaries around your time and capacity with yourself and with your colleagues; taking real time off and using the "Out of Office" function even if you’re technically still in your office because it’s in your kitchen. If you're running your own businesses or close to someone who is, my article Nothing Personal? might be helpful.

Whatever you do, be clear where you work and be clear where you live - be more Wemmick!

Next, some ideas to help when others seem to blurring the lines between personal and professional in their emails to us.

Write to reply?

For many of us, the last 16 months or so has brought a big increase in the volume of email. Remote working means that issues which would have been a quick chat after a meeting or in a corridor have migrated over to email, adding an unwelcome weight to our inboxes and an additional burden to our time.

Email is highly effective for some things (e.g. broadcasting and distributing information, confirming things, newsletters!) and not so great for others. One issue, as we all know, is that email tends to make individual communication far less nuanced and far more transactional.

When it comes to more complex communication, something happens in the gap between us pressing "send" and the email being opened. The absence of tone means that, so often, an email which left our computer as a gracious request arrives as a passive aggressive ask or a brusque order.

This is made even worse when we receive an aggressive, annoying or accusing message and are tempted to reply straightaway. When this happens, I tell myself and my clients to remember that email has all the immediacy of speech and all of the permanence of letter-writing with very little of the upside of either.

Much of my practice as a business coach involves helping clients grow in professional self awareness. When I recently asked a client what he found most valuable about our work together, he responded, "Perspective! Learning to step back and to respond rather than react to things at work." What a great result!

So the next time you receive a challenging email at work, a few ideas to help you to respond thoughtfully rather than to react straight away:

1) Remember that what you read may not be what was meant

2) Relate - where possible, have a conversation either in person or on the phone to clarify what the sender actually wanted to say

3) Reflect - in true ONION style, think carefully what you want the outcome of your reply to be before you send it

4) Rest - if you do write a rapid reply, put it in your drafts folder for 24 hours and come back to it before sending

5) Refer - ask a trusted friend, colleague or family member to have a look at your draft and let you know how it reads

6) Remove - if can't speak to the person and you have to reply fairly quickly - review the email you've written before sending and be ruthless in removing any words which make a value judgement

7) Relax - if you've made the effort to respond thoughtfully rather than to react hastily, you can relax and move on knowing that you've done everything you can to preserve (and even prosper) the professional relationship

For more on this topic, including more detail on the ideas above, click on the button below.