How to coach your team to write more effective emails

If your workers send emails as part of their job, coaching them on writing emails more effectively is a low-hanging fruit, and failing to do so is a massive missed opportunity. Yet, almost no one does.

The impact of better email writing

If your team is excessively polite and formal in their internal emails, wasting twenty seconds to add a few unnecessary lines, and they send twenty emails a day, addressing this would save three workdays a year. (20 emails a day times 20 seconds equals 6.67 minutes a day, multiplied by 220 working days equals 24.45 hours, which is about three 8-hour working days).

If your team sends external emails, how much would a 10% higher closing rate mean to you?

If your team’s poor communication causes unnecessary back-and-forths, how much would cutting these by 10% mean to you?

Coaching your team to write better emails is a high-leverage activity and should be high on your to-do list.

Refute the pervasive assumption that people know how to write emails. Most people have never been trained and would benefit from some coaching.

Let’s see how you can do it, and let’s begin with what you shouldn’t do.

What not to do

• Don’t enroll your people in a course on writing better emails. Most of the advice contained there would be too generic for the specific emails your team sends.

• Don’t ask HR to train your people, for the same reason as above, with the exception of an HR person who knows extremely well the context your team works in (it’s rarer than commonly believed).

• Don’t hire an external coach, again, unless they specialize in your specific industry and have extensive knowledge of the kind of work your team does.

• Don’t run a one-way training, where you speak and your team listens. You might give your people the perfect checklist to follow (assuming it exists), yet they might not follow it or follow it sub-optimally.

Don’t make it formal. Depending on the context and personalities involved, announcing a formal session might produce feelings of inadequacy, skepticism, annoyance, anxiety, or other negative emotions.

Instead, here is what to do.

Coach your people

Here is how I used to coach my people to write better emails.

First, I would observe. I wouldn’t proactively take action but wait for an email with ample margins of improvement to enter my inbox.

Then, during my next one-on-one with one of the people on my team, I would mention the email, saying I noticed it could have been written, e.g., more clearly.

I would be very specific, pointing out what exactly was unclear. If more than one thing were unclear, I would focus on the more important one – mentioning more than one problem might feel overwhelming.

I would avoid being arrogant or confrontational. One great way to achieve this is to frame it as “I used to make the same mistake, then my former manager explained this to me, and now I write more clearly, and that helped my career.” Notice how it helps to explain not just why clearer emails are beneficial to the organization but also to them.

Once the problem is clear, it’s time to help them improve.

If this is the first time we’re having this conversation, I might simply ask them to “write more concisely” or whatever behavior I want them to correct. Then, I would keep an eye on their following emails to see whether they implemented the advice – and if they did, I would be quick to praise them to reinforce the behavior.

If, instead, this isn’t the first time we’re having this conversation, I would have to dig deeper.

First, I would explain what adverbs mean in practice. Everyone knows they should write more clearly (“clearly” is the adverb). Fewer know what it means to write clearly or how to do it. It’s your job to explain this.

Personally, I do one of the following three exercises.

1. If conciseness is the problem, I tell them that the email should have been half the length. Then, I put a printed copy of their email in front of them and ask them to strike out the unnecessary parts. Finally, I validate their efforts, telling them that what’s left now is clearer. This last step is critical, for lack of conciseness often derives from a belief that unnecessary details help.

2. If clarity is the problem, I tell them it’s unclear what the request or takeaway from the email is. Then, I ask them to tell me what the point of the email is. Once they tell me, I say they should have written exactly that either at the beginning or end of the email.

3. If beating around the bush is the problem (common in status updates that try to hide a problem between paragraphs of positives), I ask them to write down up to three bullet points with the most important things they want the reader to know. Then, I tell them their email could have been those three bullet points.

Of course, feel free to adapt these exercises to your needs and the specific problem you want to correct.

That said, here are a few principles you should follow:

• Be specific. Don’t just say what they should do. If they don’t know how to do it, also explain how to do it.

• Be concrete. Talk in terms of actions. Use specific examples. Show them a bad email and explain why it’s bad. Show them a good email and explain why it’s good. Notice how this very article is specific and concrete; otherwise, it would be useless.

• Never criticize the person. Never say, “You’re unclear.” Instead, say, “This paragraph is unclear.”

• Validate their improvements. People often communicate the way they do because they believe it’s the most advantageous way. For example, people who struggle to be concise often believe that details are necessary. In this case, just telling them to be more concise won’t work. You must get them to write something more concisely and then validate that what they write is clearer, thanks to the absence of details.

• Keep validating their improvements every now and then. You should catch them right and let them know you noticed relatively frequently, at least during the first few days or weeks. Failure to do so might cause them to believe that you don’t care or that their efforts are going to waste.

• Get them to commit to adopting the new behavior in the future. The best way to do this is to ask, “Do you feel ready to apply this to future emails,” or, even better, “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t apply this to future emails?”

Conclusion

Coaching your people to write better emails is a high-leverage activity: with 15 minutes of your time, you can save them workdays writing unnecessary words, decrease wasteful back-and-forths, and improve your teams' persuasion if they deal with external clients.

The best way to improve your team’s email-writing skills is to coach them individually.

Focus on a single area of improvement, be very specific about why it's a problem and how they could improve it, give them actionable next steps, and validate their improvements.