Week 11 Lecture: Workplace Behavior

Why structured answers beat instinct, why the bad email fails, and the three-sentence rule

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Introduction#

The full bad email from this week’s lab, read aloud flat and professional, no commentary. Interviews, meetings, and emails are all skills with real, measured best practices; today’s scope is structured interview answers, meeting conduct, and email brevity only — the topic most directly tied to life immediately after this course ends.

Definitions#

Interview (noun)

a structured conversation in which a candidate's suitability for a role is assessed via prepared questions, not vibes.

Professional email (noun)

a written workplace message with one clearly stated purpose, ideally identifiable without reading past the second sentence.

Meeting (noun)

a scheduled gathering of people who could have been sent an email, distinguished from one by ending without anyone confirming who does what by when.

Body#

• Structured answers beat improvised ones. Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998) found structured interviews showed a predictive validity of about .51 for job performance, meaningfully higher than unstructured interviews; combined with a general mental ability measure, validity rose to about .63.

Check-in: According to this meta-analysis, is a free-flowing, unstructured interview actually a better predictor of job performance, or worse?

• Structured conduct in meetings. Decide your one input before the meeting starts — a point to make or a question to ask — and contribute it early rather than waiting to be asked. Disagree with the structure from Week 8’s apology model in reverse: state the alternative and the evidence for it, not just “I don’t think that’s right.” Leave with a decided next step, named with an owner and a date — a meeting that ends without one produced nothing, however long it ran.

Check-in: What's the difference between disagreeing with 'I don't think that's right' and disagreeing with an alternative plus evidence?

• Why the bad email fails, in full. Sent at 11:52pm on a Sunday to a group of five, forwarded within the hour by three separate recipients to the other two with no comment beyond “thoughts?”, reproduced below exactly as it landed in all five inboxes at once:

  Hi team,

  Hope you’re all doing well! Just wanted to reach out and touch base about a few things. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the project timeline, and I know we all discussed this a bit last week, but I wanted to circle back and get everyone’s thoughts again since things have kind of shifted a little since then. There’s a lot going on this week for me personally so I might be a bit slow to respond to things, just a heads up. Anyway, the main thing is I think we might need an extra day for the deadline, or maybe two, not totally sure yet, still figuring that out. Let me know what you all think when you get a chance, no rush though! Also random thought but should we get lunch sometime this week? Anyway let me know about the deadline thing.

  Thanks so much, [Name]

  A buried ask, a rambling opening, an irrelevant tangent about lunch plans — the same overestimation of how clearly the words alone were landing that Week 9’s Kruger et al. (2005) finding on egocentrism in text already covered.

Check-in: What are the actual three things this email needed to say, once everything else is cut?

• The three-sentence rule, applied. State the situation, state the ask, state what you need from the reader — one sentence each, in that order. Applied to the email above: “The deadline needs to move by one to two days. Can everyone confirm that works by tomorrow? If not, let me know what would.” Everything else — the greeting, the apology for being slow, the lunch tangent — goes in a separate message, if at all.

Check-in: Which of the email's original sentences survives the three-sentence rule, and which don't?

In-lecture activity#

Conclusion#

Interviews, meetings, and emails all reward structure over instinct — the most immediate real-world stakes of any topic in this course. You now have a structure for interview answers, a way to contribute in a meeting and leave with a decided next step, and a three-sentence technique for emails. Coming up: this week’s lab (the mock interview and the shrink-down).

This week’s reflection, due 12:00 Tuesday of week 12: describe one piece of workplace or professional conduct you observed this week — your own or someone else’s — rather than one you performed for an audience.