JOHN, THE CEO OF A SALES ORGANIZATION, SENT AN E-MAIL TO TIM, an employee several levels below, to compliment him on his performance in a recent meeting. Tim did not respond to the e-mail.
About a week later, he was in John’s office applying for an open position that would have been a promotion into a management role, when John asked him whether he had received the e-mail. Yes, Tim said, he had. Why, John asked, hadn’t he responded? Tim said he didn’t see the need.
But Tim was wrong. John’s e-mail deserved, at the very least, a thank-you.
Tim didn’t get the promotion. Was he passed over solely because he didn’t thank John for the positive feedback? No. But was Tim’s lack of response one of several reasons that convinced John he should choose a better candidate? Undoubtedly.
Before you accuse John of being trivial or oversensitive, before you condemn his poor hiring judgment, consider what saying thank you represents.
On a basic level, it communicates that you received the e-mail. While there’s a lot of advice that discourages writing thank-you e-mails because they contribute to e-mail overload, I disagree. I answer every real e-mail I receive because I want to avoid the recipient’s “Did Peter get my e-mail, and what’s he thinking?” angst. It takes three seconds to respond “Thanks!” and it completes the transaction initiated by the sender.
But an e-mail that contains emotional content—like a compliment—deserves something longer: a real, thought-out thank-you as opposed to a simple I-received-your-e-mail thank-you. When you offer a real thought-out thank-you to someone, you’re acknowledging her effort, appreciating her thoughtfulness, recognizing her intent, and offering feedback on the impact of her actions.
Still, it’s more than that. Those things are rational, but saying thank you is mostly an emotional act. It connects one person to another. Saying thank you doesn’t just acknowledge someone’s effort, thoughtfulness, intent, or action. It acknowledges the other person.
Acknowledging other people is a critical responsibility—perhaps the critical responsibility—of a great manager, especially in sales. Actually, great manager is too high a bar. I might say it’s the critical skill of a good manager, but even that’s understating the necessity and impact of acknowledging others.
Go ahead and argue: we’re all too busy at work and in life to spend time exchanging pleasantries; if John needs so much stroking, he can’t possibly be a good CEO. He’s out of touch with the digital age where unanswered e-mails are the accepted norm; if Tim is doing his work well, that’s all that matters; people are paid to do their jobs, and they don’t need to be thanked; saying thank you to your CEO for a nice e-mail is nothing more than brownnosing.
I would disagree with all those arguments. It doesn’t take long to say thank you, but it does take caring. John is an excellent CEO, with a staff, board, and shareholders who love him and for whom he delivers a high growth rate and excellent results. Not answering someone’s communication—text or e-mail or phone call—is not an accepted norm, it represents a fundamental breakdown in communication about which I often hear people complain. Tim might be good at certain aspects of his job, but he’s not “doing his work well,” if he’s not acknowledging the people around him. And finally, saying thank you isn’t brownnosing; it’s nice.
At a time when we are all too busy and have too much to do, it’s tempting to focus only on essential communications. It seems unproductive to spend time saying thank you.
But the opposite is true. Our instinct not to send thank-you e-mails (whether in an effort to save us time or to avoid overloading others with unnecessary messages) actually backfires. It ends up creating more work for everyone—especially for the original sender, who wants to know whether we had received their message and invariably will e-mail again to confirm. A thank-you not only confirms receipt of their message—saving us and them time—it creates goodwill and makes relationships stronger, more resilient, and less likely to devolve into energy-sucking conflicts.
The consequences of not saying thank you become more obvious if you take away the digital element. How would you feel if you complimented someone in person and he just walked away from you without saying anything? Weird, right?
Saying thank you—sincerely and with heart—feels good. Not just to the person receiving it but also to the person offering it. And that’s part of work too. It’s hard to remember, as we process our hundredth e-mail, that behind each message is a person. Tim would have done well to remember that.
While skipping sending a thank-you message might seem like a time-saving strategy, it rarely pays off. People like to have their efforts and their own messages acknowledged. Doing so creates the kind of goodwill that might make your relationship immune to future time-sucking conflicts. Saying thank you is never a waste of time.