Leadership through email: standards and perspectives.(IN HER OWN WORDS)

Email is one of the primary sources of communicative documents of our digital age. Each email is a miniature story, as well as a small part of a much larger whole.

Though small, emails have tremendous power. Unlike the proverbial thick letter from the admissions office or the heart-stopping memo from the provost, they don't typically reveal their importance in an inbox.

Emails can be both torturous and redemptive, depressing and uplifting, clear and ambiguous, informative and deceptive--all as they boldly invade privacy by entering a person's space without permission and sometimes violating basic rules of professional conduct.

Although email is a major communication tool on campus, its potential as a powerful, influential leadership tool is often ignored. Especially for women, email is very powerful, not only to share information and respond to messages, but also to exercise leadership in higher education.

I've conducted much research on the issues involved in using email to communicate and passed it on to students in my educational foundations and leadership courses, who learn when and how to effectively use email to communicate with parents, administrators and other students.

Over the years, I've designed templates of many types of email and developed rubrics for their measurement for students. Most of the graduate students in my foundations and leadership courses are female veteran teachers, who admit they rarely use email to communicate with colleagues. They do use it to communicate with the administration, especially on a sensitive topic when they feel the need to "put it in writing."

A case study