Email Tips for Leaders: 3?s for Maddy Niebauer, founder of vChief
KHP:
I am thrilled to have my friend Maddy Niebauer, founder of vChief Virtual Chief of Staff Services here to talk about one of my favorite subjects, email productivity. Maddy, you and your team work with so many leaders. When you think about the best of the best, what do those folks do with their email? How do they approach it… and what pitfalls do people fall into?
Maddy:
I think that people who are best at email are the ones who are deliberate and thoughtful about how they approach it. They know that email can be a giant time suck and it can distract you from really focusing on big strategic projects that you're trying to handle. So they are the people who set aside specific blocks of time to look at their email. They turn off notifications so if they're in a call, they're not getting an email popping up and then their brain starts looping towards that when they *should* be sitting and focusing on the conversation they're having.
I think in terms of when and how you check it, that depends on the job you have, right? Some people need to be more quickly responsive. Others could really check it twice a day and be fine. Controlling how much you're spending time on that in your personal life too is important. We’re all trying to be present for our family, but it's so easy to sit there and have your phone on all the time- I’m totally guilty of this- and just be responding to emails perpetually. There’s a balance, because you want to be responsive to people and you don't want them to wait… but also, if you’re perpetually looking at email, you’re perpetually not having your attention where your attention needs to be.
Those are some of the bright spots and potential pitfalls I see people falling into.
KHP:
I love all of those thoughts. In my email overhaul course, one thing I think about a lot and try to help people think about is just that intentionality piece. What are you doing when you go into your inbox? How long are you spending? What's your strategy? Because it is so easy to just click into it a million times a day and not make any progress.
Maddy:
And it's interesting- to the strategy point, I think there are lots of different successful strategies, right? There are the people who like file all their emails and very specific places, and there are people who keep them all in one place and then just sort for things when they're looking for things. I don't think there's necessarily one right answer. I do think there's a number of different ways one can go about it that helps you make sure that things aren't falling off your radar, and that you're not also looking at the same email five times when you could just look at it once and respond to it.
KHP:
I know that your team supports leaders with their email in different ways, whether that's teeing them up, helping people manage their inboxes. For leaders who might have that option or might be considering having a chief of staff or an executive assistant in their email with them, what tips do you have for them? What should they be thinking about?
Maddy:
I think this is a really good question. I've talked to a lot of leaders who feel like their inbox is overwhelming them and that they're missing really important emails. There’s the junk that we all get that you either can ignore, or quick things you can respond to… but there's also really important things that can't fall off the radar. I think the biggest thing that's important (whether it's an executive assistant or a chief of staff doing it- I've seen both and both can work great) is having a really strong system. If someone is actively in your inbox, if they are touching your emails, do you want them to leave them read, or unread because are you going to know that you missed an email? Are they going to flag them in certain colors if there are actions you need to take? Are there things they can just respond to on your behalf, or things they know the answer to? It takes working together for a pretty good amount of time to figure out those systems and sort of testing those.
One thing that we do a lot of is just teeing up emails. When I had a leader I supported, we would go through her calendar every week and talk about all the meetings that she had had. What are the follow up emails that needed to happen? What are the attachments that need to go to those people? And I would just make like 20 emails for her and leave them in her draft folder so that she could click in, add any personal details, and then shoot it off. What would have taken her 20 minutes now takes her three minutes and it's a huge time saver. We’d also do that for her upcoming meetings to say, okay, what do you have in the pipeline? Who do you need to like send materials to in advance of your call so that they're prepared to talk about what you're talking about? That might mean putting together an agenda for that call, or it might mean sending the latest results from your program if you're talking to a funder. Teeing that up can be really helpful. I actually did that when I was not in someone's inbox- a lot of confidential stuff came to the head of HR’s mailbox, so I wasn’t actively managing that inbox… but in Outlook, you can draft an email for someone else and say “send from” and she could just click on it and go. GGmail doesn't really have that capability, so you really sort of have to be in someone's inbox or draft something in a word doc or a Google doc and attach it. Then they can copy and paste, which also works but is a little less efficient.
KHP:
I am hearing you say that it can be totally worth it and it can work well… but even in just what you just described, there's a lot of thinking and a lot of communication that has to go into it to set it up on the front end.
Maddy:
Absolutely. And I think the thing is that takes a lot of effort upfront is learning how to write in someone else's voice. Once you have that down, it is absolutely invaluable. And then leaders find that they can't function without it. They're like, I need that person!
KHP:
I can see that for sure. Zooming out a little bit: you and I both work with individuals on their own email systems and productivity, but where we might be able to get even more of a productivity bump is if we think about email culture across an organization. What's on your mind about that? How would you advise a leader to start overhauling an email culture?
Maddy:
There's a couple of different ways that I think about it. One is at an organizational level: What are the norms and practices you want to set around email? For example, what is your expected response time? If you send something to someone, what belongs in an email versus belongs in Slack or another system, or what needs to go into a meeting? Setting norms around those things and having those conversations is important so people know what to expect.
Another thing is for managers of teams is to know how their team uses email or how those individuals use it and know who really does well with it and who might struggle with it. If I'm not getting a response from this person again and again and again, what does that mean? And how do we work to improve that? And I think the course that you're offering is such an amazing resource that I think so many people can benefit from, especially those people who really struggle to stay on top of it, and teaching them, building those skills so they can stay better organized. It’s so easy for your inbox to just explode and be out of control and then really important balls get dropped.