Life after the Email of dread

byadamseaman

We need to bounce back from our own mistakes. For instance, what do you do in the face of an email of dread?

What’s an email of dread? It’s when you send an email about a person to someone else, but you accidentally send it to the person you were writing about? Sorta like what happened to me today! Here’s the scoop. I gave a personality assessment to the small staff of a client last week in preparation for a staff development session last Friday. By coincidence, my friend Sophie (names changed to protect the innocent) was telling me that her friend Charlotte recently started dating a man, we’ll call him James, who was to be in the session. Since I just received this James’ assessment results I sent them to my friend…or so I thought. Instead, I hit reply to James: “Hey, check out Charlotte’s new boyfriend’s results. Don’t share J.” I did not even realize my mistake until this morning when I received an email from my client explaining to me why James was not in attendance for our Friday session. As I realized what I had done a feeling of dread washed over and consumed me. Embarrassment. Chagrin. My ego quickly jumped into action trying to make excuses to explain away my behavior but failed. My mood today started great but was quickly hijacked. “OMG! What should I do about this?” I panicked. Here’s what I did:

1. I owned my behavior and told my ego to chill. “This is real. It’s on me. I did this.”
2. I wanted to call James immediately but first I needed to collect my thoughts. I called Sophie. Of course, she never received the email. I explained the situation. This helped me get my bearings.
3. As soon as I was clear, I called the James and apologized. I described what I did (which he already knew, obviously) and explained why it was wrong of me. Fortunately, there was nothing demeaning or negative in my email (but that’s not always the case with emails of dread). It’s important to address the other person’s concerns—it truly must be about them in such cases. James’ concern was who I intended to send it to and why I intended to send it. In this case, fortunately, both were benign reasons. My breech was that I should have asked him if I could share that information first. But many emails of dread are not as tidy.
4. I reiterated my apology and James graciously accepted. I still felt like there was more I should do but there is a point when an apology gets creepy (“Please, I’d like it if you accepted my house as atonement.”)
5. I apologized to my client. While I didn’t wrong her directly, my actions created collateral damage for her. Part of cleaning up spilled milk is to also look for splashes that may not be at the point of impact.
6. I committed to learn from my mistake—what other errant emails might I potentially send and how can avoid even worse follies in the future?
7. Do something productive (like write a blog entry). It’s been very difficult to get back on track with my day. Everybody on the planet must think I’m a bad person and every person I interact with for the next week will look upon me with scorn…”Shun…Shun.”

Here’s what I did not to do:

1. Excuse my behavior. Blame someone else. Ignore the situation entirely hoping nobody would notice.
2. Neither did I confess my sins to the world, crawl repentantly on my knees until they bled or tattoo a scarlet letter to my forehead. We have to forgive ourselves.
3. Quit. Correcting a mistake with a mistake is no correction at all.

The email of dread is just one of the follies we can commit. Unlike the many mistakes we make that go beyond our notice, however, they give us a chance to account for ourselves and become better for it. But Damn, I wish it never happened in the first place! What’s your “Email of Dread” experience?