🚩Tactical Memo 078: Hedging Isn't Humble

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Three weeks. That's how long a sign-off sat dead on my sponsor's desk.

The project slipped. My team ate the delay. I was ready to blame him.

Then I reread the message I sent him.

"Hi, just following up on this. No rush, whenever you get a chance."

He did what I told him to do. Nothing. No rush means no rush.

I wrote that message thinking I was being easy to work with. What I actually did was hand a busy executive a reason to skip me. And I'd been doing it for years, in almost every message going up.

Executives don't see the work. They see the sentences carrying it. When the sentences hedge, the reader doesn't register manners. They register doubt, and they price the work accordingly.

It runs downhill too. My team writes the way I write. Every softener I send gets copied by people whose work carries my name.

So now I run a fifteen-second pass on anything going up or out.

Strip the Hedge.

Here is how I run it.

1. Draft fast, ugly, no self-editing. The polish comes in the pass, not the typing.
   

2. Reread it as the receiver and ask one question. Would the person accountable for this work send this message? Or is it the message of someone asking permission to have sent it?
   

3. Cut the shrink words. "Just." "Sorry to bother you." "I think maybe." "I feel like." Every one of them lowers the price of the message. If my read of the numbers is a position, I state it as one. "My read is" survives the pass. "I feel like" doesn't.
   

4. Put a date where the vagueness was. "Whenever you get a chance" becomes "by Thursday." No date, no priority. If I can't name the date, the ask wasn't ready.
   

5. Kill "try." It's a pre-written excuse. "You'll have it Friday" or "Friday doesn't work, Monday does." Either answer builds trust. "I'll try" spends it in advance.
   

6. End on the ask. Never on "does that make sense?" That question begs the room to find the hole. If I want questions, I write "Questions?" and stop typing.

The difference is one message.

Weak, to an SVP: "Hi, sorry to bother you. Just following up on the vendor decision. I think maybe we should move forward with the renewal? Not sure if I'm reading the numbers right, but whenever you get a chance, let me know if that makes sense."

Strong: "Vendor decision. Renew, one year, not three. Usage supports it and the exit clause protects us. I need your yes or no by Thursday to hold the pricing. Questions?"

The weak one took me longer to write. All that padding is work. Work spent teaching an SVP my ask can wait.

A note on AI, because half my outbound starts as a machine draft now. Those drafts come back soft. Apologetic openers I never felt, hedged verbs, a "hope this finds you well" nobody hoped. I strip them the same way. The pass takes fifteen seconds and the draft cost me zero, so there's no excuse for sending the hedge.

Here's what took me longest to accept. Nobody ever pulled me aside about this. No boss ever said "your messages read as unsure." The punishment for hedging is quiet. Slower replies. Your ask slipping behind someone else's. A sponsor who goes cold and can't say why. You never get the feedback, so you never fix the writing, so the price keeps getting paid by your team.

Fifteen seconds fixes it. That's the whole cost.

So before your next send, run it.

Read it as the receiver. Cut the shrink words. Name the date. Kill "try." End on the ask.

Every message you send is a manual on how to treat you. Mine used to say "no rush."

Yours might too. Go check.

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Until next time,

Justin Bateh, PhD
Founder and Editor
Tactical Memo