Reading Response Week 2
From reading the “Boss’s Angry Email Sends Shares Plumeting” article I realized that communication plays a huge role in the success of a company. Not only is it important to be able to communicate effectively with your clients and customers, its more important to have a great communication network with your employees. The employees ultimately drive the company and if you can’t convey your message to them in an appropriate manner, you might see simlar results as displayed in this article. Another thing that I found interesting was that because this execuive of Cerner Corporation used email to send his message, it was easily sent to more than those who were intended to view it. Which leads to the point that when sending a message you must make sure that you are using the right medium for your audience. This executive claims to want to start a fire under his workers, however, to them he came off as being arrogant. To me it is easy to understand why these employees became so angry by this email rather than inspired. The problem is that in an email you can’t tell the tone of what the person is saying to know whether or not it is positive or negative. I have experienced the same problem when instant messaging my friends, you can’t tell whether they are joking or being serious, there is nothing that helps you to distunguish what the emotion behind the words are. And, it is part of our culture that most of us automatically assume the negative. It would have been better for this executive to talk to his employees face to face that way his message would have been less likely to have been taken in the wrong way. I think that email is probably a medium that should be reserved for more inforational purposes instead of messages that contain a lot of emotion.
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Great point that the wrong medium was used for his audience. I think that it is important for someone in this situation to realize that these emails can easily be forwarded and sent to others. They are basically public information and if you don’t want them getting leaked you should not send them. Personally, I think I would get far more inspiration from a talk with my boss then an email. I also have run into this problem of not being able to tell someone’s tone on messenger, it is easy for someone to confuse someone for being serious when they sarcastic.
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I agree that email should be used for information. It’s extremely convenient when you have to send information to a large group of people. Even when you send information to a small group or a single person, you have to remember that what you say can be seen by everyone. I’m always told to not write anything that you don’t want the whole world to see. Mr. Patterson did not think very clearly; he let his emotions get the best of him. Emotional issues should really be addressed in person when possible. Emotions are hard to see through an email. Like you said, tone is hard to read in an email. Often times people are saying something harmless but it comes off very edgy due to the way it is written.
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I agree when you say that communication plays a huge role in the success of a company. The relationships you talk about between clients and customers is really important for the success of a company as well. If you are specific and efficient through the communications, then it will be easier for your company to grow. You also talk about tone in your response, something I talked about in mine as well. I also agree that it is very hard to tell the tone of the person that is sending you the email, you can perceive it in a different tone and get the wrong message. In the case of the CEO, I also agree that the best solution to his problem was to talk face to face to his employees (as you mention it in your response as well) since in this case the employees get the right message, instead of what looked to be a threat. Emails today can solve many many problems but at the same time could cause many other problems as well. In the case of this CEO, it was a huge problem.