Never complain, never explain (over email)
Throughout my career I've found myself doing something I can best describe as translating English into English. Watching two people, both perfectly articulate, talk past each other completely - not because of any language barrier, but because neither is really listening to the other. They're defending a position, making sure their point lands, winning the argument. The actual problem, and what the other person needs, gets lost somewhere in the middle.
A lot of that comes from the work environment people learn to communicate in. I started my career in consultancy - an industry that can quietly encourage a combative approach. You're billing the client, so you're protecting the engagement and you're making sure your position is understood and respected. That defensiveness becomes habitual. People carry it with them long after the context that created it has gone, and it shows up everywhere, especially in the way people write emails. The instinct to hold your position crowds out the instinct to understand the other person's.
The best organisations I've worked in have taken the opposite approach. Customer-focused in a way that is genuinely oriented toward understanding what the other person is trying to get to, and solving for that. What I've seen consistently is that when you take that approach, when you build a relationship on trust rather than transaction, everything becomes easier. When something goes wrong, when something needs to change, when something needs to be paid for, the other party is far more willing to engage because the foundation is already there. Empathy isn't soft. It's commercially smart.
Too much communication breaks down not because of what people are trying to say, but because of where they're trying to say it. A principle I've held for a long time, and shared with teams I've worked with, is this: never complain, never explain over email. Not because complaining or explaining are wrong - sometimes both are necessary - but because email is the wrong channel for either. It carries only the words, and those words are 7% of how we communicate. The tone, the body language, the signals that let the other person know you're on their side, that you understand their position, that this is a conversation and not an accusation - gets easily lost over email. Sensitive conversations belong in a room, or at least on a call. Anything that requires empathy to land properly needs a channel that can carry it.
There are some specific versions of this problem that I've encountered working across cultures and with colleagues for whom English isn't a first language. Words or phrases that feel straightforward to a native English speaker can land very differently depending on who's receiving them. "Shame" is a good example - in British usage it often means something closer to "what a pity," but for someone translating it more literally, it can read as an accusation or a personal attack. "Revert" is another - used casually in some business contexts to mean "get back to me," but interpreted quite differently if you're managing a codebase. These aren't always minor misunderstandings. They can trigger genuine emotional reactions and derail conversations in a way that requires repair. The words we reach for instinctively aren't always the ones that land as intended.
What I keep coming back to, across all of it, is that communication works when people are genuinely trying to understand rather than to be understood. The channel matters, the words matter, the cultural context matters - but underneath all of that is something more fundamental. Are you trying to find out what the other person needs, or are you trying to make sure they understand what you need? The first of those is where resolution lives. The second is where most of the emails get written.