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Investigating email personality types to better understand yourself and clients

Written on July 24, 2011 by Rose Ryrie

Investigating email personality types to better understand yourself and clients

Understanding email personality types

Doctor Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Psychology Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst >imposed the five main personality types (typically used in psychology and psychotherapy) to emails to better understand digital communications. Dr. Whitbourne notes that the days of analyzing handwriting have changed given the rise in email communications and analysts across the globe are struggling to investigate how the lexicon of email can be analyzed like handwriting.

First, lets look at the Five Personality Types according to Dr. Whitbournes summary:

Openness to Experience: This is the willingness to entertain new ideas, to enjoy exploring fantasies and adventure, and to appreciate the arts.

Conscientiousness: As the term implies, people who are conscientious are punctual, neat, and attentive to detail. They can be counted on to complete what they start.

Extraversion: People high on extraversion are outgoing, sociable, and willing to self-disclose. Theyre typically happy and optimistic. Conversely, people high on introversion, the opposite end of the scale, prefer to be by themselves, are uncomfortable in social situations, and dont like to reveal much about their inner states.

Agreeableness: Easy-going and immune to the aggravations that come from everyday annoyances, people high in agreeableness are also calm and level-headed. You wont hear much complaining from them.

Neuroticism: This is perhaps the darkest of the Big Five, because people high on Neuroticism are prone to excessive worry, anxiety, and feelings that others dont like them. They are pessmistic, always expecting the worse. They tend to ruminate over their perceived failures and are high in self-doubt.

These five personality types are helpful to understand in business regardless of tech implications, but Dr. Whitbourne attempts to impose these five personality types on emails, noting that there is obviously overlap just as with personalities, but understanding this theory could be extremely helpful in better understanding yourself and your clients. Lets take a look at the Professors five types and her recommendations accordingly.

Email type one:

The open to experience email type: Your emails are whimsical and entertaining. You may end your email with a sign-off that includes a reflective quotation. You dont like using capital letters, but you do like using abbreviations. When someone presents you with a problem, you tend to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions. They may not be feasible, but they can shed a new perspective on the issue allowing the people high in conscientiousness to work out the details. Your emails are short because you dont really feel like spending much time on a particular problem. You may be that person who hits reply all instead of just reply because you didnt actually take the time to examine the recipients before you pushed send.

Recommendations: For the most part, being high on openness to experience is a good thing in emails because at least they wont be boring. The only danger is that you might come across as flaky or impulsive. If this diagnosis fits you, my only suggestion would be that you avoid these dangers by waiting a minute or two before you push send to double-check your grammar and spelling, making sure you actually read the email thoroughly before replying, and testing out the feasibility of any solutions youve proposed. Also, take care to edit the to and subject lines By the way, Gmail can be particularly bad because it hides much of an earlier conversation and lumps related emails together. Make sure that one didnt sneak into the conversation that doesnt belong there. Taming your impulsivity is particularly important if youre using mobile technology, which can be unforgiving when it comes to proofreading or giving careful thought to your response.

Email type two:

The conscientious email type: Your emails are thoughtful and purposive. Chances are they are very detailed, possibly running one or two pages with specific suggestions about how to handle each aspect of the problem at hand. Your inbox is virtually empty because you respond as soon as you receive the email, though you do take your time in composing your response. You read and re-read your email, and rarely do you have typos, grammatical errors, or abbreviated words. Your favorite emails involve such topics as writing contracts or the minutes of meetings (or scrupulously reviewing those written by others). You live to revise your organizations bylaws, hammering out each and every detail of a policy, or devise a meticulous timeline for a project. In your personal emails, you enjoy providing details such as travel directions, recipe instructions, or plans for a get-together.

Recommendations: There are many advantages to being a conscientious email type because other people will be grateful that they dont have to take on the work that you are doing (especially if those other people are the open to experience type). However, you may run the risk of not having your emails read because they can get to be too long and detailed. For example, if you bury the time and place of a meeting somewhere on the second screen of the email, people may actually not even see it if they are skimming and therefore youve defeated your purpose. Also, you may cause other people to resent the fact that youre so prompt and they are not. The best way to use conscientiousness to your advantage is to write the email you want to write with all of its gory detail, and then force yourself to edit it down to a reasonable length or level of specificity. You can always stagger your emails so that you dont hit the recipients with all the details at once but give them time to digest the information and then move on to the next piece that needs to be addressed.

Email type three:

The extraverted email type: Your emails start with Hi! not Dear. You may have a permanent signature that says Cheers! In fact, your emails most likely have more exclamation (and double exclamation) points than periods. Your personality bounces off the page, and you appear enthusiastic about almost everything and everybody. After meeting someone new, youre the one to initiate the follow-up contact. You may not even wait to meet someone in person but will reach out to people in your network who youd like to get to know better. You dont mind revealing your inner thoughts and feelings to others, even to those you dont know very well. Your favorite email topics involve party planning or office get-togethers, and youre always ready to suggest a phone call or in-person meeting as an alternative to email communication because you much prefer human contact.

Recommendations: Ive written elsewhere about the problems created by the tendency to over-share in emails and other online communications such as Facebook. In fact, the true extravert runs the risk not only of being too self-disclosive in emails but of spending far too much time on social media instead of work. The personal warmth you express in your emails goes a long way toward overcoming the impersonality of online communications. However, you may overpower or frighten off the recipient who may not share your excitement or wish for human contact. If you mix extraversion with openness to experience, you can also appear as if you are not a serious person; a jokester who cant be relied on the do the heavy lifting in a project. Your emails may be seen as frivolous and you wont be considered a suitable candidate for taking on a position of heavier responsibility.

Email type four:

The agreeable email type: A 3 pm deadline and its already 2:30? No problem, youll just shift around what youre doing now to accommodate the persons request. Other people may send you emails that are curt or even rude, but you wont read too much into their motives. Instead, youll assume they are stressed or in a rush, and meet their request to the best of your ability. Youre always willing to volunteer for any committee assignments, and when youre asking others for help, you are polite and respectful. You never use passive aggressive tactics to stonewall or seek retribution even when others deserve your scorn by criticizing you unfairly or making unreasonable demands. Your even temperament and genuine tendency to like people means that you will never fire off an angry email that you later regret.

Recommendations: For the most part, youre doing fine because you project a positive image to others, are cooperative and helpful, and never spit out angry accusations no matter what someone does to rattle your chains. But being too easy-going might lead you to be perceived as a pushover, and your extra duties might pile up hopelessly because youre always willing to chip in and donate your time. To help balance out your over-zealousness to be nice, you need to learn to say no. Start with something that is easy to refuse to do that you know someone else is capable of doing and then move on to something that would go against your will to please but would add unnecessary complications to your already busy life. You can still say nice things in your emails; just dont feel overly pressured to please.

Email type five:

The neurotic email type: With your tendency to worry and over-think small, everyday situations, you scrutinize each email you receive for signs of possible criticism or hidden meaning. If a person who used to sign off with Best regards now merely says Regards, you wonder if the disappearance of Best means that this person no longer cares about you. A bounced-back email that says you were rejected from the listserv might cause you to think that youre no longer wanted in the group, rather than to figure that there was a computer glitch somewhere. Before you send an email, you read and re-read it not, as the conscientious type does to find errors, but to make sure you havent said something that could get you into trouble. If someone doesnt respond to your email after a few days, you figure you said something wrong rather than realizing the person might be busy or not think its necessary to reply.

Recommendation: Neuroticism in your email world may reflect difficulties youre experiencing in other areas of your life, such as struggling with an anxiety disorder or depression. However, if your difficulties are limited to email, dont cause extreme distress, or dont cause impairment in other areas of your life, then there are some steps you can take to exorcise with your email demons. First, you need to realize that email by its very nature is impersonal and that many people dont really mean to imply something negative if theyre being terse or just commenting on something that isnt a criticism of you. Second, if you worry about someones reaction to something you said, then go ahead and ask that person to clarify. You can even pick up the phone to discuss it. Third, dont ruminate over every possible implication of your own email language. You may end up spending far too much time on each email and important deadlines may pass you by. Supervisors who pick up on your extreme sensitivity may believe (rightly or wrongly) that you cant handle the slings and arrows that come with higher-up positions. Toughen up your outer shell so that youre not so sensitive to criticism and your online life will be much less stressful.

Which type are you?

Which of the above types are you? Are you a combination of multiple types? Does this help you to identify personality types you work with in the field or perhaps fellow real estate professionals?

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