Forbes Article: Learning as Leadership CEO Bans Internal Emails for a Week

Shayne Hughes, CEO of Learning as Leadership, experimented with an internal email ban at his company for a week. He described the experiment on Forbes.com.

"In most companies today, internal email is half to three quarters of all traffic. Reading, processing, managing, organizing, and responding to it absorbs vast amounts of time. We clog one another’s e-mail systems and to-do lists with a mishmash of crucial topics and trivial information and then waste hours of every day slogging through a hundred useless e-mails to ensure we don’t look irresponsible by missing the two or three important ones.

Worse, e-mail is rarely the best medium for addressing the issues and opportunities at hand. It brings us quick questions that don’t have quick answers; long, informative rambles with no clear action steps; conversation chains with too many people cc’d and many of them offering oversimplified opinions. And that’s on a good day.

Buried beneath our collective e-mail dysfunction are the important conversations our organizations and relationships need to move forward. E-mail is the worst forum for tackling these. Time and again I see leaders being harsher by e-mail than they ever would be in a direct conversation. E-mail has become a false way of addressing conflict, and the costs in terms of time and trust are dramatic."

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