By Recently I had a bit of a kerfuffle because of something I posted. I re-read and couldn’t see what the issue was, but the person was so irritated that I removed the offending verbiage…which brings me to today’s post. Have you ever been caught off guard by someone taking offense at something you wrote?
I’m reminded of two examples in my career where emails were misinterpreted: one where I took offense and one where someone took offense at me. In the first instance, I was working at Snelling and my boss was sending emails in all caps. Why was he screaming at me? I couldn’t figure out why he was so upset with me and was in turn getting quite upset. I finally decided to ask him what was wrong, only to find out the email was written in all caps because he kept the caps lock on. He found it was easier for him to type that way. He wasn’t mad at all. Phew!
The second instance happened many years ago when I sent an email to a client that went into grave detail regarding a recent issue with the software and how I resolved it. His reply was ‘this is way too much technical jargon.’ I immediately replied back, apologizing. Unfortunately for me, it was my apology that offended him because he thought my sincere apology was condescending. We stumbled through that exchange..with my lessons learned to be much more careful in my emails to him.
You don’t know what lens people are using when they’re reading your email or post. Re-reading what you write before hitting send is always a good idea, especially if the relationship is already tense and you know there is a potential for misinterpretation. Or better yet, don’t hit send and let the email sit in draft mode for a night to give you time to cool off (if you’re feeling spicy). In especially difficult relationships, I have asked someone neutral to read my email before sending.
It’s not that I’m a bad communicator, I promise you. I’m actually pretty good at it. There are just a few instances where I’ve had testy clients who were just looking for a reason to attack. I didn’t want to give them one.
There’s a great series called ‘I said this, you heard that‘ which we studied back in 2021 through a Sunday School class at RUMC. It’s an interesting concept, dividing people up into 4 colors and noting their different communication styles. I hate stereotyping, so when I took the quiz, I may not have answered truthfully, so I’m not sure it ‘got’ me right. It said I’m a yellow (melancholic). As I’m reading the descriptors now, I’m thinking…yeah…maybe it did get me right.
I do think our brains work in different ways. There is clearly a difference between an engineer’s mind and a creative artist’s mind. One isn’t better than the other…they’re just different. And differences are what make us great even if they trip us up from time to time.
