There are times when nothing can substitute for in person talking. There are two situations where I have seen communications go awry.

1. You offend someone. People are sensitive. And while email and texts are efficient, they can lack context and end up miscommunicating intent. And though you didn’t intend to do it, now you’ve got to go mend fences.  I have seen two very senior people not speak to each other for months because of a miscommunication. It can happen because someone got blindsided in a presentation, because an inappropriate response was sent to many people on email, because something got repeated out of context…you get the drift.

When this happens, you need to go see the person and have the conversation. It doesn’t have to be confrontational…often a “Hey, got a minute? I wanted to talk to you about something …” works. Then have the conversation you probably should have had in person versus email/powerpoint/text or whatever form it came in instead.  You don’t need to apologize for your point of view, but you do need to apologize for how you made the other person feel.  I have said things like ” I didn’t mean to make you feel I was unsupportive. I didn’t mean to make you feel blindsided.” Then move on.

2. There’s a crisis brewing, but you rely on email or voicemail to tell people.

This is the “bad news does not age well.” When you have a problem or issue, here are the steps I’ve taken to make sure people are aware.

1. I stick my head in the office with the “heads up” message. Yes, I interrupt if it’s important enough. It usually goes like this:

“Just wanted to make you aware, we just found out that x happened. We’re still chasing down all the facts, but it looks like y, but we won’t know until probably end of day today. I’ve got Joe and Nancy working on it, and we’ll come back to you when we have more data.”

In that 15 second sentence, the following happened 1) I let my boss know, 2) my boss knows it just happened, 3) he knows I’m looking into the details, 4) he knows when I’ll get back to him, and 5) he knows who I have assigned the problem to.

Now, my boss might have more questions, but in 15 seconds, I covered the most likely set of questions which he would ask. the most important thing: I got to him before anyone else did.

2. More time has passed, and now I have more information. So I’m back in my boss’s office, telling him 1) chronology of what happened, 2) what we need to do now, 3) what we still don’t know, 4) who’s been notified or needs to be told, 5) if I need resources/take action to resolve.

3. After the crisis is resolved, I always go back with the team with the question: “What do we need to change to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”. Nothing is worse than a problem that repeats itself.

And those two senior people who stopped talking? I advised one to go and buy the other person a cup of coffee and go visit him in his office. Just a casual “stop by”. They chatted, and started talking again.