The Email Nobody Asked Me to Send

Think about what lands in a typical IT professional’s inbox on a typical Tuesday.

Complaints. Requests. Escalations. The passive-aggressive “per my last email.” The ticket that got reopened for the third time. The reply-all that should have been a direct message. The URGENT subject line from someone who has never once had an actual urgent situation but treats every situation like one.

Now think about the last time something positive arrived. Unsolicited. From an unexpected direction. About work you didn’t think anyone noticed or cared about.

For a lot of IT professionals, that’s a once-in-a-decade Tuesday.

A few times a year, an institution-wide issue surfaces that impacts my LMS due to another system. The cause is somewhere in the overlap and resolving it requires genuine collaboration. I bring what I know from my side. Someone in another department brings what they know from theirs. They do in-depth research in their own system, run it down, and apply the fix.

The transactional version of this story ends there. Trouble ticket routed. Problem solved. Ticket closed. Everyone moves on. “This is your area. It is affecting my area. Fix this.” No acknowledgment, no relationship, no memory of the collaboration by the following Monday.

I don’t end the story there.

When someone does heroic work on short notice, work that prevented hundreds of my clients from having a very bad day, I find out who their supervisor is. And I send an email.

Not a reply-all. Not a forwarded thread with a quick “great work!” bolted onto the top. A direct, discreet email to that person’s supervisor. Just the two of us. No CC line full of people who will generate a reply-all-fest. I say what the person did, what would have happened if they hadn’t, and how much I appreciated their responsiveness. I let the supervisor decide what to do with that information. My job is to make sure it exists.

The tone of the email depends on who’s receiving it.

If the supervisor is by-the-book, formal, no-nonsense, the email sounds like this: “I wanted to make mention of so-and-so going above and beyond their task list to help me resolve an issue that would have affected hundreds of students and faculty. I am very appreciative of their responsive results, and wanted to share my appreciation with you, their supervisor.”

If the supervisor is a down-to-earth human being with a functioning sense of humor, the email sounds like this: “So-and-so saved my bacon last week on short notice and I cannot overstate how much chaos they prevented. I believe they should get the employee-of-the-week parking spot for their heroic efforts!”

The parking spot, of course, is entirely fictional. At my institution, reserved parking is the exclusive territory of senior leadership. The people actually saving bacon park in the lot with everyone else. That’s the joke. It’s also, if you look at it sideways, my point.

I want to be honest about what I’m trying to do with these emails.

The default communication culture in most institutions flows in one direction: top down. You communicate with your supervisor. Your supervisor communicates with their supervisor. You don’t reach across departmental lines to praise someone else’s employee. That’s not your lane, that’s not your chain of command, that’s not how it’s done.

I think that culture is exactly why so many IT professionals spend entire careers waiting for a Tuesday that never comes.

One discreet email at a time. I’m trying to change that. Not from a position of authority…I don’t have any. Not with fanfare…that’s not my style. Just a professional in one corner of the institution telling a supervisor in another corner that their person mattered last week, and that someone noticed.

That’s not a transactional culture. That’s the beginning of a relational one.

I don’t know what happens after I send those emails. Maybe the supervisor forwards the praise. Maybe they mention it in a one-on-one. Maybe it sits in their inbox and informs how they think about that employee at review time. Maybe the employee never hears a word of it.

But somewhere out there is an IT professional who opened their email on a random Tuesday and found something they didn’t know they were waiting for. Something that didn’t come from their own supervisor, didn’t arrive through official channels, and wasn’t required by any process or protocol.

Just one person, from a completely different department, who thought their work was worth a two-paragraph email to their boss.

I hope it made their Tuesday.

More later...