I love it when a CEO models the “right” behavior in the use of email. No better way for these best practices to infiltrate the organization.
Take Kasper Rorsted, the chief executive of Henkel, the consumer and industrial products company based in Düsseldorf, Germany. In an interview in the NYT, he used notable space to the issue of email and how he uses it. Click here for the article.
Interesting to note:
- He prides himself in doing less email and being “more present”
- He deletes all emails for which he is a cc rather than the recipient, without reading them
- He uses email only for very short messages, almost like text messaging
Here’s a great quote form Rorsted: “I’m not advocating against e-mail, but you can get into a great argument in e-mail because people can read whatever they want into the words. It takes two minutes to pick up the phone, so I try to encourage that as much as I can. It’s not either/or. I’m just saying you’ve got to get the balance right.”
I wish all CEOs had this approach!
