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:
Match your history to the bandwidth. If you have enough of a history with a person to accurately predict their reaction to the communication, you can try having the conversation over email. If you don’t know the person well, then you’ll have to bump up the bandwidth of your connection with them. Being in the room would be best. Connecting visually with video conferencing or Skype might give you sufficient visual data.
State your intent before content. You can often head off defensive reactions by opening with statements that clearly communicate your good intentions – or even your fears about your colleague’s potential misunderstanding of your intentions. For example, you might say, “I have concerns I want to express about the Bangalore team. I want to describe them – but I worry you may think I am trying to take the work to Dublin. I am not. I just want our customer to get the best we have to offer. May I describe my concerns?”