The Question

From a reader · introduced by Joel Akande

From a reader on Friday evening. He has to give difficult feedback by email to a direct report who has been with the firm for six years and is, by any reasonable measure, brilliant at the technical work and increasingly damaging at the relational work. The reader does not want to do this on a Monday morning Zoom. He has been drafting the email since Wednesday and it is getting longer, not shorter. What is the right shape of this letter?

The Answer

By Joel Akande

Three paragraphs. The first is your honest assessment of what they are excellent at. The second is the specific behaviour you are asking them to change, described in the smallest unit you can describe it in: one meeting, one comment, one email, one moment. The third is what you are going to do, with dates. No more than three paragraphs. The temptation is to put the relational thing fourth and the operational thing fifth and a caveat sixth. The reader will read the first three paragraphs carefully and skim the next three. By paragraph four they are scanning for the word ‘fired’. Send it at the end of your working day. Their working day, not yours. Be available for thirty minutes after they have had it. Do not draft a follow-up before they have replied.

The Margin

By Rebecca Tully

On the editing pass nobody schedules: read it aloud. Read it aloud quietly to yourself. The sentences you stumble over are not yet right. The sentences your voice flattens are flatter than you meant. The sentences where you find yourself adding an editorial ‘now look’ before the verb are the ones that need rewriting, not the ones that need delivering.

The Week

• Two readers asked for our position on the Microsoft Excel of the year award. We have no position. We do not understand the category.
• Useful long read in the FT on the difference between succession planning and replacement planning. Olusegun has a forthcoming piece for us on the same question, from the other direction.
• A reader who chairs an audit committee asked for advice on the company secretary who is, in her words, eighty-five percent good and fifteen percent the wrong person for the role. Our reply: never trust the percentage. Investigate the fifteen.

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