Calling your boss is a bad call, and not just for Millennials

Question

My manager insists that “it’s always so much easier to pick up the phone”. I disagree, especially given that he has a tendency to answer the phone with greetings like “What?!” and “I’m busy - this needs to be molto rapido”.

He’s also loose with the truth and I feel that facts get easily lost over a phone call.

He scoffs at my insistence that email or a chat conversation might be best, and calls me a “Millennial”, even though I’m 43. Any suggestions?

Dreading calling your boss? There are good reasons to revert to written communication.Credit: Moodboard

Answer

I’ll just be straight with you: I stood, applauded and cheered loudly upon receiving your email. When I sat down, I wrote this:

I disagree with your boss. It’s not “always” easier to pick up the phone. Not at all. Choosing the phone as a first communications option is the exclusive domain of salespeople, journalists and those in possession of wonderful or terrible news.

You’ve beautifully summarised one of the main reasons why: People can say anything they like over the phone and, unless the other person is recording it (which is a whole different column), it comes out through the other speaker and then escapes into the ether. True, it enters the other person’s ear and, if it’s important or vicious or an admission of illegal conduct or a loud bodily noise, it probably gets burned into their consciousness, but that’s not much help when it comes time to “put up or shut up”, as they say in the classics.

Work therapy. Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit: John Shakespeare

So if your boss has a proclivity for misplacing the truth when it comes to significant work matters, I think phone calls are a terrible idea.

I also think they’re a terrible idea for at least one other reason.

Mobile phones are a disruptive technology in the original sense of the term (the one Clayton Christensen coined back in the mid 1990s). At the time they came along and pulled the economic rug from underneath fixed-line telephony, they offered convenience at the expense of call quality.

In fact, since mobile phones became mainstream about 20 years ago, it would be fair to say that sound clarity hasn’t really improved at all.

Bad call quality leads to awkwardness, embarrassment and in some cases the sort of calamitous misunderstandings usually reserved for B-grade comedies. And because we Millennials (it sounds like your boss thinks that’s every single person reading this) only use mobile phones, we’re more vulnerable to these pitfalls.

My suggestion would be to continue using any medium that allows you to record the details of your exchanges. And if you really have to call, simply say “Oh, sorry, I’ll email” and hang up when your boss answers with his hypocritical rudeness.

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