You Can Have Constructive Conflict Over Email
When email was novel 20 years ago, managers began asking us if it should be used for sensitive conversations, such as performance problems or salary negotiations. For years we said “no way.” But as work became more and more virtual, the question changed. People no longer asked, “Should I?” Instead, they demanded, “How can I?”
So our stance has changed too, in large part because we identified people who seemed to be able to raise risky issues in remarkably effective ways over email.
While you should still limit its use for sensitive communication, there are best practices that allow you to benefit from email’s efficiency without suffering much from its constraints. But before you do, ask yourself: “Can I do this well without seeing her face—and without her seeing mine?”
This is because faces matter. A lot. They are the primary tool we use for discerning the intentions of those around us. Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske finds that our primal programming urges us to assess any being that enters our visual neighborhood. The two questions we involuntarily ask are: Do they intend me harm? and Could they carry it out? We make these judgments largely by reading nuances in faces.
Not only do we use faces to gather information, but looking others in the eye also causes us to behave more ethically and empathetically. When someone is out of sight, they are much more out of mind. Have you ever been insensitive to someone in traffic then craned your neck in desperation to avoid eye contact when your victim pulled beside you at the next stoplight? Have you suffered the humiliation of saying something negative about a colleague only to discover she was standing behind you? Have you ever said something in writing that you would never have said in person?
Sure, I have a few relationships where I can text almost anything and get away with it, even something terse like, “Your last report was light on facts.” I can do this because, in these rare instances, if their face puckers up in some unpleasant way, they’ll tell me. They know me well enough that they can imagine the face I had on when I wrote it (curious, but not angry), and if they doubt the mental picture they have of me, they’ll ask.
But these are rare relationships because we tend to trust visual data more than verbal. If someone says, “No, I’m not angry at you,” but their lip is twitching while they say it, we believe the lip not the words that passed over it.
This is problematic in virtual conversations because the massive mental resources that would ordinarily be occupied with scanning a face have nothing to see, so we make it up. We might read the words, “Your last report was light on facts” and imagine your face filled with disdain and your lip curled into a snarl.
In the absence of the accountability and trust that seeing someone’s face promotes, you have to be especially careful. Here are four rules to keep in mind: