Don’t Be The Postman Manager

hi...

Interesting one

Don’t be the Postman Manager

Ping – there is mail in your inbox…

Mechanically click on it…

“Hi Elango – can you please look into this – this is becoming an issue”, at the head of what seemed like a much-forwarded mail. Hmmm… that was very interesting. Reading further, I figured that it was an escalation email, with the sender ranting about the issue he was faced with. His exasperation with the endlessness of its resolution led him to write to me, as a final resort. At glance it read like a fairly easy task to resolve. I thought to myself: “Why has this reached me?” So I set aside what I was doing and scrolled down to what seemed like an endless please fix forwards. By the time I reached the end, it was clear that the sender missed a part and if he’d fixed it right in the beginning, the situation would never have reached where it did. I responded with what was missed, and he acknowledged the same and closed the task.

It didn’t take a genius to figure that and the issue was not with the sender. It was the way each person handed the task to the ‘next available’ one.

The mail had gone through 12 mail boxes. Except for the first three, all the others were one-liners like the one I received! The mail had taken all of three days to reach my Inbox through 12 Inboxes and three time zones!

The world tour could have been avoided if his immediate manager had bothered to read the mail properly and taken a few minutes to understand the problem.

This is not a stray incident – it happens in every organisation that has an email interaction. Hail the emergence of a new kind of manager: ‘The Postman Manager’.

Those who are hunched over their laptops forwarding emails. Especially the ones with the smart phones – they are the biggest postman managers! A deft forward here, a push there and a good day’s work done. A big time waster, productivity sucker and creator of an illusion that we are all busy doing work.

Can we stop it? Of course we can. It starts with each one of us. Here is a quick guide to get out of the postman trap:

READ IT, DON’T SKIM THROUGH

Take a few minutes to read the email in full not just the first two lines. Many a times the answers are in the mail its just we haven’t got to that.

DON’T BE QUICK GUN MURUGAN

Think before you reply or forward – you could be setting an unproductive, timewasting chain in motion.

TEST THE VALUE YOU ADD

Ask yourself this question next time you receive a request for information, data or whatever, what is your value? Are you going to be a mere postman, where you are better off directing the person to the relevant person rather than being the go-between? If you want to be the go-between, what is your value addition other than just hitting the forward button? If there’s no value, step aside. Can we figure out if we can find other ways to add value? For if we don’t, organisations will find ways of forwarding us into oblivion. And if you don’t want that, ask yourself the following questions:

What do I do that my reportee cannot do? Are you spending more than 30% of your time on email? (if you don’t know the answer, download an email plug-in like XOBNI. It will provide you with useful statistics) How much time do I spend meeting my customers and employees, and doing work outside my Inbox? For unless you are an email support associate, your work is outside the Inbox in the real world.

The answer to that will help you understand if you are adding value or just playing postman!

Good luck, and forward this article furiously so that it reaches every working professional. And may that be the last forward you will ever do!

The writer is chief human resources

officer at MphasiS

Regards

Ilujlt

Dear Ilujlt,

You have written a long post expressing your anguish. However, my analysis of why has it happened is as below:

a) The staffs and managers and not trained on "Business Writing Skills".

b) Your company has not made standard templates for communication. Communication with vendors, service providers or internal communication like how juniors should communicate with seniors, how seniors should communicate with juniors etc

c) E-mail communication has brought in its wake informality in our professional life. This very drift towards informality is taking toll of professionalism.

d) Immaturity of the managers. In the erstwhile era, one was required to wait for 8-10 years to become managers. Now managership comes within 2-3 years. Mere by acquiring designation one cannot become mature.

e) Partly your leadership is also responsible for what has happened. Why your leadership has created or allowed to grow culture of this kind? It appears no formal means were employed to give a shape to the organisation's culture. Leadership has rather has allowed to organisation's culture to take its own shape rather than putting deliberate efforts.

f) I had chance to work in MNC that operates in 220 countries. However, what they did was standardisation and uniformity in communication across the globe.

g) The incident well illustrates why soft skills training fails. Soft skills training is far more than games and trainer's body language or delivery. Trainers should cover topics like the one you mentioned and revolve their discussion around these topics. To make sure that the trainers succeed, training managers should do sufficient research and provide adequate real life examples or case studies to avoid goof ups or repetition of goof ups at the workplace.

But then we are all quite busy people. Is it not? Do we have time for standardisation? Do we have time for giving shape to the organisation's culture or do training managers have time to do research in what's happening at the workplace?

Anyway my heartfelt thanks for sharing this incident. If at least one member learns from this post then purpose of writing your post would be achieved.

Thanks,

Dinesh V Divekar

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Dear Dinesh Sir,
I completely agree to the valid point made however there are employees who really do not want to actually take ownership at all and therefore keep on cascading the same..
In the world of internet even if a company has not trained for soft skills there are several templates available on the email ettiquettes per se.
However, more often its the will issue of not broadening one's horizon and sticking to the same old orthodox means/writing standards.
I firmly believe that one on attaining a Management position should try to self-inculcate these traits..

Interesting post.

Not just business communication, we have to admit this, most people working today are working to pay their bills. So, as long as they get by, they don't care for developing themselves. They don't even consider their own behavior towards others.

Most managers today, esp. the ones in the IT industry, and esp. the ones in India, are very incompetent, and merely act as postmen, or mouth pieces. This is a frustration I have for long wanted to communicate. Most of these people should never even have been in the software industry.

This only goes to show the lack of accountability in the corporate culture today. It also shows that even the top management is probably filled with such people. That is why they do nothing about it. They just want to stay popular. They don't want to do the right thing and get rid of bad people.

I am actually making a play on this very issue. It is a play about the life of a software developer (or rather the lack of it). It will be a comedy with a sad undertone to it. It will depict how the software development industry is in a bad way today because it is dominated by incompetent people who have no self-discipline or any good habits whatsoever, not to mention they are mostly non-technical people who should never have been in the IT industry anyway. They probably should have been doing something else, but they chose to work here because here's where the money is. And now they rule it.

You may watch a promo of my play on YouTube here: Auditions For My Play Start Soon - YouTube

Also, please spread the word about my play to as many people as you can.