The worst Slack messaging mistake engineers make

A simple trick to easily avoid alienating the whole organization

Engineers absolutely HATE repeating themselves and explaining something twice.

Imagine this scenario:

There is some problem in production, and a technical support team member raises it in a Slack channel. You have a back-and-forth discussion, and you write what they need to do to address it.

Then they do the complete opposite, and ask you why it didn’t work.

Your reaction will probably be: “BUT WHYYYYY”.

So what do you do next?

You write one of the MOST HARMFUL SLACK MESSAGES EVER:

• “As I clearly wrote above…”

• “As I just mentioned…”

• “I already explained it previously…”

• “We just agreed to do X and you did Y, what did you expect?”

Or even worse:

• “I’ve said like 5 times to do X!”

• “I already told you why!”

• “Go read the previous messages!”

You got the point.

And the person on the other side?

They’ll feel ashamed and humiliated, and probably resentful towards you. Do it enough times, and they’ll just hate working with you.

The idea for this article came from a tough feedback I received.

Orel Zilberman

, who I work closely with, wrote to me:

"Listen, you don't need to call me out on everything. It feels like you point out every single thing you think I'm doing wrong."

That’s a very brave feedback to give to someone. I knew I had this tendency, but I didn’t notice how it affected other people.

Why does it keep happening?

The problem with Slack messages, is that you can’t be interrupted for clarification. When you explain something face-to-face, you see immediately when someone doesn’t understand. They too, can just ask a question at the right moment.

Slack/Email discussions are not like that. You assume that other people read and understand your messages, but the longer the message/discussion is, the less likely people are to understand every part of it.

Then, when someone ‘ignores’ one of your messages, and makes a mistake, you get angry.

There is a quote I love from “The One Sentence Persuasion Course” book:

This need to be right often overtakes our desire to be well thought of, and even our desire to be treated well.

There is a simple solution

This simple trick changed my behavior:

Imagine the other person has 10 times more Slack channels than you, and 10 parallel conversations with other people.

This will help in 2 ways:

1. You’ll just write better messages

More concise, straight to the point, no fluff.

2. You’ll be more forgiving

What’s so bad about repeating yourself?

Put yourself in the shoes of the other person. You made a mistake, misunderstood a message (or even completely missed it).

So what?

Yes, if it keeps happening, something needs to be done about it. Nowadays most communication is async, and people need to get better at tracking everything that’s written.

But that feedback can be said nicely, and afterward.

Final Words

I’ve recently covered that great “Give & Take” by Adam Grant in Being fair is not the best way to succeed. The main point is that Givers, people who give unconditionally to others, are the TOP performers in organizations.

A little bit of patience can get you very far.

What I enjoyed reading this week

1. How to minimize social threats in the work place by

   Paulo André
   . A very interesting model to become a better leader.

2. The habits of effective remote teams by

   James Temperton
   . The BEST article I’ve read on successful remote work!

3. Communicate like a pro - use deltas by

   Jordan Cutler
   . Jordan starts a new article-series about communication, and I think it’s a MUST read. It is aimed at seniors, but I found the first article very useful for managers too!