Workplace Wisdom: Long Emails, Sales Success, Better Feedback, and More Expert Tips

COMMUNICATION Help Those Long Emails Go Down

Writing a long email? Break it into two parts, says leadership expert Erica Dhawan. “Start with a quick summary at the top and then go into the details.” It greatly helps people digest the message, she writes in “Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance.”

SALES Unlock Superstar Potential

When you have someone on staff who is a natural salesperson, put away the rule book and stash the scripts, say marketers Rich Baker and Gary Levitt in a column at MarketingProfs. “Encourage creativity, boldness, and authenticity. Tell them you have made a choice to embrace the soft science of human interaction over the hard science of metrics — come hell or high water,” they write. “With this lofty mindset in place, every customer interaction will be a slam-dunk and crackle with the intangibles you need to transform customers into loyal friends.”

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGEMENT Ask For Advice, Not Feedback

Feedback is a gift, be it negative or positive, or so we’ve been told. How do you improve after all, if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong? But what if that thinking is wrong? Recent research from Harvard Business School study found that a better approach was to seek advice. The reason is threefold. First, people love giving advice — it makes them feel valued. Two, they don’t love giving negative feedback — it makes them uncomfortable to tell you where you messed up. Three, feedback tends to look back and is often not “actionable,” whereas advice can be. It’s important when seeking advice to ask for specifics and to ask someone who has the appropriate experience to help.

RECORD-KEEPING Back Up Like a Pro

In most things in life, good enough is just fine. But that’s not the case when it comes to backing up your files. “Be a pro when it comes to storing and saving your data. Back up your backup,” says Kevin Kelly in his book, Excellent Advice for Living. Kelly recommends you have at least one physical backup and one backup in the cloud. And if you really want peace of mind, keep more than one of each. “How much would you pay to retrieve all your data, photos, notes, if you lost them? Backups are cheap compared to regrets,” he says.

MOTIVATION Reframe Awkwardness

Here’s a great piece of advice from business author Dan Pink: Reframe the way you view awkwardness. “Awkwardness is not an excuse. It’s an opportunity. It’s a signal from your brain that you’re about to learn, grow, and experience something novel. So, talk to new people. Try an unusual sport. Awkwardness is a paper tiger easily slayed.”

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGEMENT Ask How They Do It

You may have wondered why your staff hasn’t figured out the way you like to work: how you like to receive and give information, your best hours, your strengths, what small things are important to you, and so on. The reason is likely because you never told them. They, too, likely have their own way of getting things done. If you haven’t yet, ask them at their next review or during onboarding. Peter Drucker, the OG of management studies, called taking responsibility for relationships in this manner an absolute necessity to achieving an effective workplace.

GO FULL FEEDBACK Knowing the Blind Spots

Before you launch that next big project, do what management guru Peter Drucker dryly called a “feedback analysis,” which involves writing down your expectations today to improve your performance tomorrow. According to business author Dan Pink, the benefits are threefold. First, it helps you see your blind spots. When you start seeing problems in retrospect, you get a lot better at identifying and avoiding potential problems in advance. Second, the gap between what you expected and what really happened might reveal some telling details about what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. And third, you’ll often find the concerns you had about the project were unfounded, and in the process you become bolder about trying new things in future.