We have all been there at some point. We need to communicate on a delicate issue, and e-mail is the only method possible because the other person is unavailable for any other type of communication. The situation can be a CTO (Career Threatening Opportunity). First of all you will be putting snesitive material in writing in a medium where there is no chance to fully erase it. Second, time is usually short in these circumstances, so there is not a lot of opportunity for detailed analysis. Finally, the subject matter gives you the feeling that you are walking on eggs.
Wouldn’t it be handy to have a check list of things to do to protect yourself in these circumstances? If you follow the steps in the attached article, you can be assured of doing no damage while not compromizing your beliefs or integrity.
The length of the list may seem burdensome until you try it and find that using this process actually takes very little incremental time, and it vastly improves your political prowess in online communication.
My advise to anyone writing emails these days would be; not to write anything in an email that you are not prepared to have read out in court. I know this is quite a high bar to work with, but from a leadership perspective our role is to be role models and to be professional at all times and one never knows when an email trawl will be called by a colleagues through subject access requests, that then lead onto your email being the subject of discussion as part of case against the organisation.