DEVELOPMENT
Is email
compromising
your executive’s
leadership skills?
Why do senior executives get caught up spending high value time and effort doing
such low value activity as sifting, sorting, prioritising and checking their own email?
In the days before email, you would never have
seen a senior executive sifting through the mail
room. So, why do they do it now?
Research over the past five years shows that
senior executives spend 75 days per year ‘doing
email’. The dollar value of that equates to $55k per
year. Most importantly, this time is often spent
after hours (early mornings, weeknights and
weekends), so now what is it really costing them?
How has this situation come about?
Firstly, it’s because executives are more accessible
than ever before. They receive email from people
who would normally be screened or filtered out if
they tried to reach the executive via phone or in
person. Along with that, executives, as decision
makers in an organisation, are prime targets
for a large number of emails from colleagues,
subordinates, suppliers, and sales people.
As a result, they struggle to find the time,
energy and mental capacity needed to cope with
the triple impact of information, communication
and task overload. Too much of their time and
attention has shifted from using specialised
leadership tasks that directly produce high value
to a ‘busyness’ spent managing inboxes and non-
essential administrative tasks that do not.
How do Executives manage their email now?
The way that executives manage their email
usually fits into one of the following categories:
Owner driver: the executive manages their own
email with a bit of assistance from an EA to manage
meeting invites and calendar appointments
w Nominated driver: the executive shares
management of the email with their assistant in a
partnership arrangement, especially when away
w
52 Chief of Staff | Issue 2 2019
travelling or on holidays.
Chauffeur: this is where the EA manages all
incoming communication and filters it such that
their executive only sees the small percentage of
email that can only be handled by them. The EA is
even able to write many of the replies.
w
Unfortunately, not nearly enough executives use
the chauffeur model. One of the biggest complaints
heard from EAs is lack of access to and control they
have over their executives’ inbox.
How has this happened?
The reason we have this issue is because email
seems to have escaped the systematisation and
standardisation that has been applied to numerous
other business processes in an organisation.
For example, regardless of the number of staff
in an organisation, there is usually just one or two
processes for things such as applying for leave,
raising a purchase order, or paying an invoice. Yet
why not email? It’s simply a business process.
As such, it too should be systematised across the
organisation.
A major problem that most executives (and
their EAs) have is that they are using a skill set
they learnt when they started using email 12, 15
or even 20 years ago. However, since that time,
email volumes, complexity, demands, workload
and urgency have increased exponentially.
Additionally, email is now deeply integrated with
almost everything else that is happening in the
organisation. Almost everything goes through an
inbox at some stage.
It begs the question, how much time has been
invested in developing the email skills of the
executives and EAs in your organisation?
If there is one area of professional development