Email Is Not for Conversations

At some point, email stopped being a tool and became a hiding place.

What was meant to clarify has turned into a barrier to real communication. Leaders are buried in reply-all loops, CC chains, and digital noise, mistaking volume for value.

Here’s the truth: email is not for conversations. It’s for confirmation. It should capture facts, decisions, and outcomes, not debates, emotion, or alignment. Those things only happen when people talk.

Real conversations, the uncomfortable, clarifying, and often messy ones, are where leadership happens. Too many leaders now use email to avoid them. It feels safer to type than to talk. Yet every time a leader chooses convenience over connection, trust quietly erodes.

Avoidance has become one of the most common leadership risks of the modern workplace.

If you want clarity, connection, and speed, pick up the phone. Walk to someone’s desk. Schedule ten minutes face to face.

These small moments save hours of misinterpretation, frustration, and wasted energy. Tone is lost in text, empathy doesn’t transmit through Outlook, and no one ever feels truly heard in a CC chain.

MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab found that high-performing teams communicate face-to-face 35% more often than average ones. Their conversations are shorter, more focused, and far more productive.

They don’t rely on inboxes to move forward, they talk, decide, and act.

The next time you begin drafting a long email, stop and ask yourself: Is this a record or a relationship?

Email should record what has already been agreed, not replace the human exchange that builds alignment.

RDL Insight: Leaders who hide behind email manage information. Leaders who talk lead transformation.

Connection does not grow through written messages, but through conversations that build understanding, trust, culture, and loyalty.

RDL, Celebrating 20 years of creating leadership legacies.