【英语生活】感谢信怎么写?

In these early days of the new year, I have two words to say to you. Thank you. Thank you for reading this column in 2006. Thank you for the hard work and dedication that you have put into it every Monday. Thank you for the passion and creativity that you have shown in the e-mails you have sent me. It is no secret that this coming year is going to be challenging, but it gives me strength to know that we are going to achieve even greater things together.I wrote those words to see how it would feel to issue a new year thank you. To get the full effect, I should have been thanking staff, but as I have none I am thanking readers instead. I can now confirm that to say thank you to lots of people feels pleasant – gracious and queenly.

I am not going to ask how it was for you to be on the receiving end. I know the answer to that already. In the past few days, I have been more thanked than ever before, receiving three messages of mass congratulation from three different bosses. Yet this is nothing by comparison to the cascade of indiscriminate thanking that has been going on in other companies. An acquaintance at a giant multinational tells me that this year he has received seven: one from his CEO (sent in the form of a voicemail message to all) and six further thank yous from divisional and regional bosses. In his turn he has e-mailed all members of his own department to thank them for their brilliant performance, too.

Receiving thanks should give one a warm glow. Yet these blanket thank yous spectacularly fail to create any warmth except possibly in the breast of the sender, as I have just shown.

While this literary genre is becoming increasingly popular among CEOs and top managers, most of them are remarkably bad at it. A couple of weeks ago, John Mack give a webinar for Morgan Stanley employees in which he said the firm's thumping new profitability was down to the strong performance of every individual. “Why did we come back so quickly?” he asked. “Because our DNA is the DNA of excellence.”

Far from feeling gratified by this plaudit, one of his employees was only moved enough to pass it on to me. What exactly was Mr Mack driving at, I wonder? Was he saying: we are excellent because we are excellent? Or did he simply mean “Ra! Ra! Ra!” – in which case it might have been better to come straight out and say that without the pseudo-scientific baggage of DNA, which is always a sure sign that what follows will be tosh.

Yet singling out Mr Mack may be unfair, as none of his peers are any good at this either.

The first problem is sincerity. Some (perhaps many?) CEOs are not particularly grateful for the talent of their people. They are more frustrated by the lack of commitment and creativity of their workforce than blown away by the abundance of it.

If a CEO can muster a general tone of sincerity, the next trick is to keep thanks a long way away from money. Thank yous that go with bonus handouts are very bad. Human nature is such that everyone is almost always disappointed by their bonus, which means handing out variable quantities of money with a standard thank-you-for-your-hard-work message only invites workers to be cynical. They think: if I worked that hard why was the bonus so small? And if the person doing the thanking got rather a lot (Mr Mack got $40m this year) it becomes trickier still.

The third lesson is to be careful about exactly what is thanked for. I would take a dim view of being thanked for my passion, as I strongly believe that passion is something best kept for one's private life. Equally, to thank people for their loyalty when most are permanently open to the idea of jumping ship sounds hollow.

A further problem is predictability. If it comes like clockwork in the first week of January, it does not feel very gratifying at all. New Year thank yous are further devalued by the fact that they tend to come with an exhortation to work even harder in future. To say “Thank you for working so hard this year, but can do better next year?” is not really a thank you at all.

The form of the e-mail itself can do damage. Too long and it looks windy, too short and it looks perfunctory. It needs to appear to have been delivered with care, so to send it from the beach house in the Caribbean via BlackBerry is a bad idea.

Even if all these details have been handled with sincerity and judgment, the blanket “well-done!” e-mail is still almost guaranteed to misfire. This partly due to its mass nature. The more people you seek to pat on the head simultaneously the more you reduce the value of the pat to each one. People who have worked hard will never be pleased to be thanked in the same breath as people who have not. Neither will they be pleased with thanks offered by a CEO who does not know them from Adam.

At the bottom of it all is the very awkwardness of a CEO thanking people at all. For a CEO to extend personal thanks implies a master-servant relationship that jars with the pretence of democracy that companies are built on. Unless done very well it is just patronising.

Alas, scrapping the thank you e-mail may not be the answer. Even though no one feels better on receiving these thanks, to withdraw them might make everyone feel worse.

Instead the trick is to keep the thanks plain and simple and supplement throughout the year with praise. This should be given by someone who knows the worker to someone who merits it, and given in private so as not to alienate everyone else. Henceforth, any readers whom I consider worthy of praise will be contacted discreetly and on an individual basis

新年伊始，我有两个字要对你说：谢谢。感谢你在2006年阅读我的专栏，感谢你每周一在这个专栏上付出的辛勤劳动和奉献，感谢你在发给我的电子邮件中展现出的激情和创造力。刚刚到来的一年无疑将充满挑战，但一想到我们将同心协力争取更大的成功，我就浑身充满了力量。我写下这些话的目的，就是想看看致新年感谢辞的感觉如何。为了获得最佳效果，我本应感谢手下员工，但由于我没有下属，所以只能以感谢读者作为替代。我现在可以确定，对很多人说谢谢的感觉很好——高尚而庄严。

我不会问你们作为接受感谢的一方感觉如何。我已经知道答案。近来，我收到的感谢比以往任何时候都多——从三位不同的老板那里收到了三封群发感谢信。但是，与其它公司中如瀑布般倾泄而下的一视同仁新年感谢辞相比，我收到的感谢信数量根本微不足道。在某大型跨国公司工作的一位熟人告诉我，他今年已经收到了七封感谢信：一封来自他的首席执行官（以语音邮件形式发给了所有人），其它六封来自各部门和各区域主管。而他自己也给本部门的所有员工发了电子邮件，感谢他们的优异表现。

收到感谢，理应使人感到一种温暖的喜悦。但令人惊讶的是，这些内容苍白的感谢未能给接收者带来任何温暖感，或许发送者除外——正如我刚才所感觉到的那样。

尽管这种文学流派正日益受到公司首席执行官和高层管理人员的欢迎，但他们多数人的运用技巧仍相当拙劣。前一阵子，摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)首席执行官麦晋桁(John Mack)向员工发表了一份网络演讲。他在演讲中表示，该公司今年扭亏为盈要归功于每位员工的出色表现。他问道：“为什么我们能复苏得这么快？因为我们的DNA是优秀DNA。”

但是，该公司的一位员工远未从这种喝彩中获得满足感，他受感动的程度仅限于愿意将它转发给我。我在想，麦晋桁的话到底是什么意思？他是在说：我们之所以优秀是因为我们优秀？或者，他的意思就是：“啦！啦！啦！”——如果是这样，那么用直截了当的方式表达要好得多，用不着说DNA这个冒似科学的词儿——它往往暗示接下来的一定都是废话。

当然，单单给麦晋桁“挑刺”可能有些不公平，因为其它公司高管中没有一个擅长此道。

第一个问题是真诚。一些（或许有很多？）首席执行官对于其员工的才华并非特别心存感激。他们更加可能因为员工缺乏忠诚和创造力而沮丧，相反，不会因为员工忠诚无比和创造力无限而喜形于色。

如果一位首席执行官的语气大体上还算真诚，那么下一个难题是：要让感谢远离铜臭。致感谢信的同时发奖金，是一个非常糟糕的做法。几乎所有人都会对奖金感到失望，人性如此。这意味着，将数额不同的奖金与“感谢你的辛勤工作”这种标准辞令混在一起，只会招致员工的冷嘲热讽。他们会想：如果我真的工作那么努力，为什么奖金这么少？另外，如果致谢的那个人拿到了一大笔奖金（麦晋桁今年拿到了4000万美元），那就更难处理了。

第三个教训是，要对感谢的具体内容保持谨慎。我不喜欢别人感谢我的激情，因为我坚决认为，激情最好留给私生活。同样，当多数人始终抱着随时准备跳槽的想法时，感谢人们的忠诚听起来也非常空洞。

还有一个问题是可预测性。如果在新年第1周中例行收到感谢，人们并不会感到非常满足。新年感谢辞往往同时呼吁员工未来更努力工作，这进一步降低了感谢辞的价值。“感谢你今年的辛勤工作，但我们明年能不能做得更好？”——这样的话根本不是感谢。

电子邮件形式本身也是问题。电邮内容太长，则显得空洞，太短又显得草率。它必须看上去是在用心发送，因此，选择在加勒比海滩别墅里通过黑莓(BlackBerry)发送感谢信，实在是个糟糕的创意。

即便所有这些细节都得到了诚挚且明智的处理，千篇一律的“干得很好”几乎肯定不会达到预期的效果。部分原因在于其“大锅饭”本质。你打算同时感谢的人越多，你的感谢对每个人的意义就会越低。工作努力的人看到自己与那些工作不努力的人同时得到感谢，他们永远不会感到高兴。他们谁都不会因为一个根本不认识他们的首席执行官发来感谢信而感到高兴。

最后一个原因，就是首席执行官感谢员工这件事本身。一个首席执行官遍撒私人感谢，暗示了一种主仆关系，这与公司鼓吹的民主（这是公司建立的基石）相矛盾。除非做的非常好，否则，这只会显示出一副居高临下的架势。

唉，放弃写感谢信可能也不是办法。尽管没有人因为收到这些感谢信而感觉更好，但取消这些电子邮件，可能会让所有人感觉更糟。

解决办法是，感谢信内容要坦率而简单，同时全年都不忘表扬。感谢信应由那些了解员工的人写给那些值得感谢的员工，同时还应该私下进行，这样就不至于疏远其他人。今后，我会谨慎联系任何一位我认为值得表扬的读者，而且将是单独联系。

译者/何黎

《FT商学院》