In this podcast transcript, Vince Moiso and Scott De Long discuss the importance of effective communication in business, particularly focusing on email etiquette. They emphasize the potential misinterpretations that can arise in written communication and the need to be mindful of tone and clarity. The speakers advocate for brevity in emails, citing the short attention spans of readers. They discuss the common mistake of including too many people in an email without specifying responsibilities, leading to confusion. Additionally, they share email etiquette tips, such as the importance of addressing urgent matters, avoiding unnecessary use of CC, and setting clear deadlines for responses. The speakers also touch on the challenges of communication in a remote work environment and stress the significance of face-to-face or video communication for certain discussions. The conversation concludes with insights into the personal habits both speakers have developed to enhance their email communication and overall productivity.
Transcript | Season 1, Episode 2 Part 2
Scott De Long
Welcome back to the CEO podcast; I’m here with Vince Moiso. And we are in part two of Communication Junction; what’s your function? I hope you enjoy it; sit back, grab a drink, and listen to the show.
Vince Moiso
Like, I think you know what I see. Less and less now because we’re so focused on it as a business. But what I have seen in the past, what I see with other businesses, is that people use email completely out of control to yell at each other and argue back and forth. I’m going to go back to something that you said. And it was just a beautiful way to say it. It is what you say. The meaning and understanding of it is what that person heard, not what you said. The same goes for email. Whatever you write is only interpreted and understood by the reader, not the writer.
Scott De Long
And always more negative than you intended. For sure. I always know if I do an all caps, you know, I’m mad, but in any other thing that written language just looks, I’m going to interpret it negatively. That’s my first reaction, the negative one. He meant this.
Vince Moiso
I take the less is more approach with email because here’s the reality. Statistically speaking, most people are going to read the first two lines of an email, and they’re going to move on; they’re just not going to read it. You know, the days of doing these long emails, of telling people how you feel and, you know, just writing a book about something, it’s done. I mean, people just aren’t going to spend the time. You want to hear a funny statistic, you know, what the attention span of a human being is? The average attention span of a human being takes a guess.
Scott De Long
I’m going to say less than 30 seconds.
Vince Moiso
Seven seconds is the average attention span of a human being. I’ll say this: you know, what is the attention span of a goldfish? It’s 10 seconds. But because of technology, we have technology to thank for that. You know, being on our phones and texting, you know, things move across our brain at an incredible speed, which has really made email harder and harder, more difficult as a form of communication. I think as best practice, you’ve really got to utilize it for informational purposes, for example. I’ve entered an order, and there’s some details about that order that I need to pass on to the team: great, perfect, perfect use. You don’t need to call anybody about that. You put that in an email; everything’s in writing, and the team gets it. But let me talk about some email etiquette quickly because this is important. This is what happens. Ten people are on the email; let’s just say five of them are in the two sections and five in the CC. And then it’s not addressed to anybody. And there’s just a bunch of information. And then there’s a question at the end. Is this the correct price?
Vince Moiso
Who’s supposed to answer that? One of the most common mistakes that happens is that we put everybody on the email list, and we don’t address it to anybody. And then we get upset because nobody responds. I can tell you if I receive an email like that, I do not respond. I’m going to assume that everyone else responded. Okay, the rule is I break that email up. I may put the team, and I give the information that is just FYI for the team. And then if there’s a question or an action item, because of that information, but I put Scott, I have a question for you. Is that price accurate? Bill, I have an action item for you. I need you to take the sales order and make sure that it gets into the system for production. That’s the best way you could do it. And then it’s easy to read. Now, my information is two or three sentences. And then I’ve got it addressed to the two people who have either a question to answer or an action item.
Scott De Long
I would take that a step further. My rule is this. If you’re on the To: line, you respond; if you’re on the CC line, you don’t. I would put Bill and Scott, the people that you want the response to because you’ve put everything so they would be in the two. Anyone that’s in a cc? This is just for your information. Here’s how I use BCC. I don’t. It is subversive. It is the worst thing that you can do; you want to CYA, let people know, that’s what you’re doing. You’re being subversive if you’re blind copying people. I think it shouldn’t be there. I can’t imagine. And there may be a scenario where there’s a reason that someone’s on there at some point. But I can’t imagine that.
Vince Moiso
The only time I use BCC is. I might give you a referral, for example. And I will do an email introduction. Or did you do the same to me? Let’s just use me as an example. You give me a referral; you do an email introduction. And then I respond. And I say, Scott, moving you to BCC, that the pursuant emails when we hit reply, all you’re no longer on, you don’t have to. That would be the only time I use BCC the rest of the time. I couldn’t agree with you more. Is there just no place for it because just be transparent, which we talked about last time, about knowing what your intentions are and who’s going to be on that email? You were ahead of me on that. Let’s talk about a couple of other things. Now, it is important that whoever you put in those two sections is exactly who you’re sending that email to. And if there are action items or anything else, that goes into two sections; CC is FYI. And we established that quickly because it was being misused. And we established it, say, Hey, here’s the etiquette across all people, all departments. If you see the seed, you are not expected to do anything in this email or respond to it. It’s FYI only.
Scott De Long
And I want you to read it. You’re aware, but you have no responsibility.
Vince Moiso
In fact, I asked to be CC read on as much as relevant that I can be copied on because I like to read it. And one of the reasons I do that, Scott, is because we have the meeting, I am going to get the phone call. And when we have the meeting the next day, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes getting the background on it. If I’ve gone through and read the emails that I see seed on, I have all the background. Now, I can jump into the meeting, and we can look for a solution. And I think CC is important. I believe overused and underused, at the same time, or misused, is the best way to describe it. Now, there is something else that I want to add to that email etiquette discussion. I gave an example of how to do it right, which is to give the information in two or three sentences. Scott, I have this question for you, Bill. I have this action item for you. This is the other thing that has always been left out. Bill. Scott is not urgent. If you can get back to me by Friday, that would be great. The problem is we never put the timing we need on delivery for either a question or an action item. Now, what happens, Scott? I’ll just ask you for your opinion and your feelings on it when you receive an email. And it’s unclear when they want an answer from you.
Scott De Long
I teach this in a management course as well. And it is, before we leave any meeting, an email can be a meeting. Here’s what we need from who, by when, simple. When I was a young manager, I had an aggressive personality. I’m going to call it assertive, but people call it aggressive. Sometimes, they call my confidence arrogance. Anyway, from my point of view, is it aggressive personnel? Let’s go with that. I’m just direct. I avoided giving people deadlines because I thought that made me look like a jerk. It’s just the opposite. It gives them the opportunity to push back and say, hey, listen, you want this by Friday, but I can’t get it till Tuesday, and they’ll tell me that right then. Or if they’ve accepted it, then Friday is the deadline. And that helps me think back to when you were in school when you got a paper due on Monday morning. When did you write it? Sunday night, deadlines helped me get my stuff down to why. If it helps me, why wouldn’t it help the other people get their stuff done, too? Well, that’s just human nature. When I grew up a little bit, I realized that it really helps other people to give them deadlines rather than making me look like I’m pushing them for something. Because I do give them an opportunity to push back and say, of course, I can’t do it by then, you got okay. Or, hey, you got these 12 other things you must do by Friday, which one?
Vince Moiso
That’s super important, Scott; you bring up a couple of different points there. What you’re saying is you’re creating agreement. And you can reset the agreement. It’s okay. That’s okay to do. And you’re establishing priorities. When I come back and say, Scott, I’ve got these 12 things that I must do. And now you want this by Friday? Well, the opportunity cost is I’ve got to push your priorities down. Is that okay? Can you tell me what the top three or four of these are that you want to be done by Friday? For the rest, I’m going to have to push them out till Tuesday, but it creates agreement. And most importantly, it creates clarity. What I found out through all of this is people want clear direction and good communication, which means they have a full understanding of their job, their role, and their responsibilities, and they want to get it done. They want to get results. But I spent half of my career not being a great communicator. I am not a great leader because I think communication is critical to being a good leader. And I believe, as you said earlier, the only direction I should point the fingers and words. Because if somebody’s not understanding or not clear on a project, direction, or whatever that might be, I only need to look at myself and how I communicated. I often reset on that. Now, it’s interesting because I’ve been in various scenarios, and I would consider myself a very good communicator today. I would also consider myself a very good writer, and I follow my own coaching on email etiquette; I do everything that I’m telling you guys is the best practice, and I do all of that. And I still make mistakes. And I’ll tell you, like, I will send an email that I think is fine. And someone will come back and say, wow, that was a harsh email. And I’m thinking to myself, what was he talking about? And I go back and read the email. And I go, wow, that was a pretty harsh email, you know, because I think sometimes, and this is what brings me to this point, part of email etiquette is slow down, slow down enough to look at what you’re writing, because you might think that you put something that’s very clear, you might think that it was just normal, clear, cut, you know, even keel, whatever the direction is, but slow down enough, reread it. Also, I still get blown away by how many mistakes I make. Especially if you’re typing an email from your phone, which I really don’t recommend. And I’m going to talk about some email habits as well in a second. But you know, especially if you’re sending an email from your phone, check the spelling, please. You know, sometimes, how many times do I get an incoherent email? And that’s the most frustrating, especially if it’s external, especially if that goes to a customer, goes to a vendor, goes to, you know, key relationship. And I think, wow, you know, we’re not putting our best foot forward at that point. Slow down just enough to reread what you’re writing.
Scott De Long
There are two things that I want to respond to in there. The first one is to slow down; what I say is just don’t hit send. Finish an email; don’t hit send. Someone brought a technique to me. They said to take the people out of the two lines, as you’re typing an email, is a great way to like or typing is a great way to get some frustrations out, type it out, type it out, write it out, do all that. That way, you can’t send, and then you’ve got to think back and put them in. I want to send this. I checked it. I’ve done all that. The other thing that I found is that my typing can be a little sloppy as well and that autocorrect does what it does. There is a software program called Grammarly that I use now that shows me what you should do. Do you want to say this? You know, you want to put a preposition at the end of the sentence; those things and your writing matter. That reflects who you are. Just like the first time you go to meet somebody, the clothing you wear matters. You’re writing the same thing. I use Grammarly now, and I do not hit send until later.
Vince Moiso
Well, you said some interesting things. You know, typing can be a great way to relieve frustration. And I’ve done that; I have a rule here, another email rule: don’t send an email for 24 hours; you must sleep on it. And you know, I’ve had many emails that I’ve written out because I got to just get it off my chest to somebody, whatever. And I sleep on it. And that email gets deleted. Every time. I can’t give you one instance that I’ve ever woken up the next morning and said, oh, I’m sending that email. Anything that I wrote in that email if I truly feel that way? It needs to be done face-to-face.
Scott De Long
That’s part of this communication hierarchy. My rule on this communication is I agree in person, face to face, via Zoom, whatever, video, phone, email below that slack and tax and all that you can’t get as much out, below that small signals, carrier pigeons. You know that sort of thing? And then there’s only one thing that’s even below that. Assuming. I assume I know what you meant. Rather than clarify. What I say is that with this communication hierarchy going from face to face, there is more potential for conflict, and conflict is just a difference of opinion; it’s a different way of looking at the world. Conflict doesn’t have to mean fighting; it can mean I see things differently; the more potential for that, the higher up that communication hierarchy you’ve got to go. If it is something that’s going to be a fight, let’s do it in person because, as you said, it’s hard to be pissed at somebody. Maybe when we were 20, and we wanted to hit somebody that’s a little different.
Vince Moiso
You’re not going to say the things that you wrote in that email to somebody to their face. You’re just not. I mean, it’s lunacy to even send those types of emails. It reminded me of just another great piece of etiquette: just pick up the phone. I think you know what happens as email chains grow and grow. There becomes this banter back and forth, where it’s like, hey, can you give me that? Hey, can you get me this? Okay, well, you know, you didn’t do this. And then we need to do that. Okay, at that point, you must pick up the phone; you just must, and email isn’t always happening in real time. Again, this whole concept revolves around assuming. I think we also assume that everybody’s just sitting in front of their computer all day. But the reality is, they’re not. If you’re in customer service, sometimes you might be on the phone, sometimes you’re getting up, you’re using the restroom, you’re eating, whatever it is you’re doing, but you’re not in front of your email all day. The problem is that things aren’t happening in real-time. And once you’ve reached that point, this is what I teach my whole entire team. Once you’ve reached that point where that email is no longer informational. We must stop that email chain, stop it in its tracks, pick up the phone, if it’s three people, four people, whatever it is, get on it on a video call. And we use teams internally. And get on teams and just get it taken care of because it ends up being like a five-minute call instead of 20 emails back and forth with not everybody understanding what’s going on. It’s all solved in a five-minute phone call.
Scott De Long
Or if we’re in the same office, the pandemic’s over, we’re backing up, kids get up and walk down the hall and say, hello, hey, I got this thing. I don’t quite understand where differences of opinion are going on here. What do you think they tell you? Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you meant. But I couldn’t hear that.
Vince Moiso
But listen, though, this is really a hot topic. I mean, this is more important than ever now. Because most businesses are going to allow more and more employees to work remotely. I’m one of those businesses; we’ve really extended the flexibility to work remotely within our business if you’re in a position that lends itself to being reserved. And because of that, it does require a strict following of this etiquette. Otherwise, there’s a major communication breakdown within our system. And that doesn’t work for us. Now. You know, we’ve created this culture of accountability on top of it. What we’ve done is anybody can call out anybody, and there’s no feelings hurt around it. We make it clear to everybody when we do our monthly team meetings or town hall-style meetings we go over communication every single time, as I mentioned earlier, and we tell everybody to hold each other accountable to what you expect, oftentimes, in a sales meeting that I have every Monday, just as an example, I have certain people and key positions and key roles that will come on and explain to the team how they prefer to be communicated to, hey, by the way, guys, I’m not in front of my computer all day. You’re finding out that my response to emails is slow. The best way to get in touch with me is by text, phone call, or whatever. Whatever the preferences of that person, we allow them to come on and say this is how I prefer to be communicated with. It’s a big deal. It’s made a big difference.
Scott De Long
We’re going to talk about accountability and creating a culture of accountability in a future podcast because I think that’s another great topic. But to wrap up this communication process, I think what I found in all the organizations that I’ve worked with is that we assume we communicate well, and I can tell you right now, we don’t. I was just talking with the CEO the other day, and he has no clue that he has been misunderstood by his folks because sometimes CEOs are hard to approach to tell them, you know, they’re wrong or whatever, because they got this presence and all that. And people stay quiet. I mean, this guy doesn’t want that. He’s got this big barrel chest and this intimidating presence and all that. But the dude wants to be told the truth; he does. Communication gets back into all of that to be able to learn how to speak truth to power. And I think that’s another good topic we can do. Speaking truth to power. We will do that in the future too because that is difficult. And it is something that power wants, whether their face shows they want it or not. They need to hear it.
Vince Moiso
You bring up a lot of things for me there. And, you know, I keep sharing some of my leadership or lack thereof, and I had poor communication in my previous business. And I didn’t know it was a complete blind spot. I can completely relate to that. Now, the way that I’ve changed that because I’ve not only embraced but I have an I have a deep understanding of how people look at me; I’m the president of the business, not everybody is comfortable just approaching me, and not everybody is comfortable just sharing whatever it is that they want to share, either. Even if I call a meeting with them or anything, I’m constantly reminding the team, guys, you know, please CC me, please share with me; I’m here to help. I’m here to support you. My job is to support you. And I want to support you at the highest level. And I can only do that if you’re providing the information to me. And if you’re communicating with me. And you must have those reminders. As a leader, you must give those reminders. And don’t be shy about it. I’m constantly doing it. I sometimes feel like a broken record. And I don’t care because I need to give that reminder out.
Scott De Long
That’s great. Let’s wrap this one up. I think this is a pretty good place to stop this because we’ve got three or four other topics that we can go for in the future.
Vince Moiso
I wanted to give one habit if that’s okay; I just wanted to share a habit I said that I would earlier, and so I want to follow through on that promise. I want to deliver on that promise. There is one habit that I want to share. We talked about a lot of habits and email etiquette, and one that I have found that has been incredibly helpful for me as the president of the organization. What’s important is that when I’m in the office, I need to focus on everything that’s going on in the office, and I have those meetings. What’s important to me is I’m not on email when I’m in a meeting. Okay, that’s one habit. I’m not sitting there doing email, and I’m not checking my phone. I’m not checking the text. I’m 100% focused on that meeting. 100% of the time, I’m present. And that’s a must habit. Secondarily, when you’re face to face with somebody, and you have that physical presence in the office, you need to spend that time working on the business and part of working on the business creating those relationships within the business. And I’m very, very focused on that, which means I’m not checking email. Here’s what’s funny: I don’t know any business that I’ve coached for. The leaders typically are not communicating what their schedules look like. And when they’re checking emails and when they can respond. Emails go to the leader in what I’d call the ether. And go Un responded for days. What I do is a habit. I’ve created this, and this is something that I learned after I read The Four-Hour Workweek, so I start my day, and I do a quick check of emails. And I’m only looking at the top hot priorities, like a response from the day before needs a quick response is super-hot; that might only be like three emails in the morning. I’ll quickly respond to those. And then I’m not likely at all throughout the day to check email; if I have a window in my calendar, I may check a few emails because I know there are some answers that are looming out there that people need. But again, I’m only focused on whatever priority emails those might be. Beyond that, I block out in the evenings about an hour to two hours of pure email, and my email etiquette and communication have gone through the roof for how good it is. Because I focus on email, what most people do is they go to email, then they get a phone call, and they get interrupted, and then they go back to an email, and then someone walks in their office, and they’re disrupted, then they go back to an email. And if you’re at home, even worse, dogs coming in, dogs barking, somebody’s coming to the door, you know, there’s all kinds of interruptions that can cause you to make a lot of mistakes because you’re trying to multitask with a bunch of different things. Now, I get that. If you’re in customer service, if you’re in other things, okay, great. You must do email all day; I’m talking specifically about the leadership of a business. The leadership of a business does not need to be doing all the email all day; your focus should be on the business, you should be in meetings, and you should be doing whatever’s most important for you to be doing to work on the business and not focus on email. I’ve found my productivity, overall, has gone through the roof because I’m not letting email control my day.
Scott De Long
There’s a couple of things in there. The first one is that it proves our point that email is a very inefficient tool. The second part is that hopefully, as the leader of a business working on a business instead of in a business, that old cliche, there is someone else who’s there to handle the crisis. How many crises do you need to fix? All right. Bankers and lawyers. That’s about it. I mean, the rest of it, there are people that should be doing the crisis, poor Shangri, be empowered to do that and know how to do it better than you do.
Scott De Long
I liked this; this was good. One of my favorite topics is Vince Benson. And we can go days on communication. And again, we talked about communication. And most people say we do that well, but we don’t.
Vince Moiso
Communication is a topic that we go deep into. And you know, we spend weeks and months teaching and coaching on communication. There’s a lot more to it. If you want more information, please get in touch with us. Both Scott and I coach communication and email etiquette at a much, much deeper level. And if you’re interested in additional information, please reach out.
Scott De Long
Thanks for tuning in. This is the CEO podcast. Every week, we’re going to be talking about a topic that just interests us; this is for us. This is fun; we have a good time doing this, talking about how we operate businesses and what works and what doesn’t work for us. If you like what you hear, great. Let us know if you don’t like anything that you hear. If you think that there’s something different about or crazy, whatever, let us know. And we can respond. We’ll respond to that as well. We want to hear a difference of opinion. Please let us know. What do you get here?
Vince Moiso
Well, this is an artifact from the local brewery here in San Clemente. Artifex are one of my absolute favorites. And the one we’re drinking tonight is called Orange You Different; it’s an IPA, obviously with a little bit of citrus hit to it. You can barely taste the citrus. In fact, you don’t. It’s about a smoothen IPA that I’ve had. It’s in my top five favorites. I get this the most often: there are a couple of other IPAs that we’ll be drinking during other podcasts from artifacts. Artifacts is hands down one of my favorite local breweries. If we were going to pick up the several breweries that are here in San Clemente, and you said, hey, where do you want to go? Vince? I’m going to say, Let’s go to artifacts. Now I’m an IPA guy. Admittedly, man, they have three super-solid IPAs, and they have a double IPA. That is also excellent. But this orange makes you different. One of my favorites, for sure.
Scott De Long
We’ll be talking about others as well. In fact, I went to Left Coast Brewery, and I met the brewmaster, who happened to be a son-in-law, one of my friends. We went down there and drank a little bit. And they had a citrus one, too. And I said, what’s that like? And this guy’s serious brewmaster? He wouldn’t let me drink it. Like he said, “It’s good. I said, wimpy? No, no, it’s good. But he pours me over their OC IPA, which is good, too. We’ll be talking about them as well. And that’s Left Coast Brewery, also in San Clemente. We also have here last wins. And even pizza is just down the street.
Vince Moiso
And a brew here. PCP support, which is also in San Diego and other places. But they brew the beer here in San Clemente.
Scott De Long
It might be all summer. We’re not going out of town because you’ll be drinking local beer. All right. Thanks for tuning in.
