Dear friends,

I have heard from several different people that they have struggled to help get their boss to take some sort of action during the coronavirus crisis. Try this technique we used in the Pentagon.

Be healthy and keep working the problem,

David

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For two years, I worked in a windowless cubicle in the basement of the Pentagon as a colonel. And as one might expect in the military’s headquarters, even colonels are pretty far down in the food chain. Four star generals are busy, and, as we all do, have limited bandwidth to make tough decisions. To get action, the colonel and lieutenant colonel action officers would compose email “tear lines.” The tear line was simply a short email to the general with a longer message (the one that you wanted the general to send out) below the tear line (we used a series of ======= (just like above) to indicate the differences between the messages). The real skill of the tear line was understanding the general’s writing style and composing a message that he or she could easily cut and paste into their email and send out to the recipients with a minimum of editing. Make it easy on your boss to act.

When I was first exposed to this idea, I resented it. I thought "what do you mean that our boss doesn't have the time to write his own e-mails? Come on. He needs to work more efficiently." But after several months in the Pentagon, I realized that was how you got things done and worked hard to compose great tear line emails for my bosses to use.

Hope using a tear line email helps you energize your boss this week.

PS — The phrase “tear line” actually stems from intelligence documents. Information below the tear line in an intelligence document has typically been cleared to release from classified sources to a wider audience. In this case, the tear line email has been cleared for your boss to send to the employees, a supplier, or the leadership team.