In his book Death by Meeting (Jossey-Bass), Patrick Lencioni makes a great point about meetings: if people approach them with a bad attitude, no amount of procedural tweaking is likely to make them better. The same holds true for email and other forms of asynchronous communication. If you train your colleagues to think of your emails as a nuisance, they will treat your emails like a nuisance. If you complain about being “overwhelmed” with incoming messages, your colleagues will probably think twice before looping you into a conversation that may prove critical for your team’s success.
