A manager at my last job told me my reports read like a robot wrote them

I used to copy and paste big blocks of data into weekly status updates. Last March, my manager pulled me aside and said, "You're hiding the important stuff in paragraph six." She made me rewrite one with the key number first, then a plain sentence about what it meant. Took me 2 weeks to stop overexplaining, but now I get more replies from the team and fewer follow-up questions. Has anyone else had to unlearn corporate speak? What did your person say?

2 comments

2 Comments

murray.jana1mo agoMost Upvoted

I saw this piece on NPR a while back about how people skim everything now, like they read the first two lines and the last line of each paragraph. I worked with a guy who would literally bold the one number he needed everyone to see and put it in the subject line of the email. That saved us so much back and forth. Your manager basically taught you that the data dump was the problem, not the explanation. Once you lead with the money number, people trust you more because they don't have to dig for it. It's a hard habit to break though, especially if you think more words means more thorough.

ryan_barnes1mo ago

Fair enough, but I see it a little different. Bold the money number all you want, but if the context around it is weak, people just take that number at face value and run with it. That's how you get the CFO asking why sales dropped and nobody knows it was because we changed the pricing model that same week. The skimming is real, but the answer isn't less explanation. It's better explanation. One number up top just gives people an excuse to ignore the part that actually keeps them from making a dumb decision.