How CEOs Write Business Emails
CEOs and managers tend to write the shortest emails of anyone else in a company. They also tend to use cc’s in their email significantly fewer times than lower-status employees. Maybe everyone should take note.
Professional Email Writing Tips
In a fascinating study more than a decade ago, David Owens, then associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University, interpreted the difference in communication styles between CEOs and everyone else as a show of power. According to Owens:
– High status employees tend to send short, succinct emails that quickly get to the point. This brevity displays the writer’s confidence with his or her own authority. It also helps minimize contact with low-status employees.
– Senior managers rarely use cc in their email because they want to appear to be managing people individually.
While bosses might use these strategies unconsciously to assert authority, maybe it’s time that everyone emailed like their boss.
Answering email feels like a full time job for a lot of people. The average employee spends two to three hours a day answering email, at a significant cost in productivity to companies.
Some large companies try to address the issue from the top down, instituting company-wide remedies. Thierry Breton, the head of major French systems integrator ATOS famously banned all email across the company’s 76,000 employees. And other companies look for alternative internal communication platforms.
No matter what the size of your company or your team, no matter what communication platform you use to connect to teammates, there are simple strategies that can help save you and them valuable time.
The most obvious one: just get to the point. Long-winded explanations, justifications, and even social niceties (“Hi Max. How have you been?”) take valuable time to write and to read. For the most part, a person reading your email just wants to know: What is expected of me right now?
Many people are afraid of brevity because they do not want to come across as impolite. But as journalist Jordan Crook famously pointed out:
“If everyone were to cut out all the niceties, everyone would be a bitch. But if everyone did it, no one would be a bitch. And right now, everyone is a bitch. Email’s bitch.”
A second simple way to email like a boss and save everyone’s time: spare the cc’s. The writers of the Email Charter put it plainly enough:
“CC’s are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don’t default to ‘Reply All’. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.”
Twenty years from now, it is unlikely that workers will still be mired in the chaotic email practices we use today. The first step to ensuring that everyone in a company spends more time doing meaningful work is to start learning how to email like a boss.