What Your Email Patterns Reveal About Your Workplace Position

You send dozens of emails every week. You think you know what your communication patterns look like. Then you actually review a month of sent mail and realize your position is different than you thought.

Email patterns reveal who depends on your work, who you depend on, and where you actually sit in organizational decision-making.

Why this matters now:

When organizations eliminate positions, they evaluate who communicates with whom about what. People who appear in critical communication chains survive cuts. People whose emails could stop without affecting workflows get eliminated.

You need to know whether your email patterns demonstrate organizational necessity or whether they show you're peripheral to the work that matters.

How to analyze one month of sent email:

Open your sent folder. Go back 30 days. Don't read every message. Scan for patterns.

Count three things:

• How many emails you sent where you were asking someone for something versus providing something
• How many emails included leadership or crossed departmental boundaries
• How many emails addressed problems versus reported status

You're looking for the ratio, not the absolute numbers. A dozen emails that solve cross-departmental problems matter more than 200 emails updating your direct team on routine tasks.

What patterns reveal about your position:

If most of your emails request information or approval from others, you're positioned as dependent. Your work cannot proceed without external input. That's not necessarily bad, but it means your value comes from execution rather than decision-making.

If most of your emails provide information, solutions, or expertise to others, you're positioned as a resource. People need what you know or what you can do. This creates organizational dependency that protects your position.

If most of your emails stay within your immediate team and address routine updates, you're positioned as internal to a single function. Your work matters to your team but you're invisible to broader organizational decisions.

The leadership visibility test:

Look specifically at emails where someone in leadership was included, either directly or copied. Not emails you sent to leadership requesting approval. Emails where leadership was included because the topic mattered at that level.

Count how many you have. Then ask what percentage of those emails positioned you as:

• Reporting a problem someone else needs to solve
• Providing information leadership requested
• Offering a solution or recommendation on your initiative
• Participating in strategic discussions about direction

The last two categories signal that leadership sees you as contributing to decisions, not just executing them. The first two categories signal you're in the information chain but not the decision chain.

Cross-departmental communication:

Email that crosses department boundaries creates organizational visibility. When you regularly communicate with people outside your immediate reporting structure, you become known beyond your team.

Look for emails where you:

• Coordinated with other departments to solve problems
• Provided expertise or information to teams that don't report to your manager
• Participated in initiatives that involved multiple functions
• Helped colleagues in other areas navigate systems or processes

If you have few or none of these, you're operating entirely within your department's boundaries. That limits who knows about your work and who would advocate for keeping your position.

The problem-solving versus status-reporting ratio:

Divide your emails into two categories. One category addresses problems: here's what's wrong, here's what I recommend, here's what I'm doing about it. The other category reports status: here's what happened, here's where we are, here's what's coming next.

Status reporting is necessary. But if 80% of your email is status reporting and only 20% is problem-solving, you're positioned as an information conduit rather than someone who moves work forward.

Organizations can automate status reporting. They cannot automate judgment about how to address problems.

What to do with this information:

If your email patterns show you're peripheral to critical decisions, invisible to leadership, or confined to internal team communication, you need to change what you're communicating about and who you're communicating with.

This doesn't mean sending more email. It means ensuring that the email you send demonstrates you're addressing problems, coordinating across boundaries, and contributing to work that leadership monitors.

Common patterns in vulnerable positions:

Certain email patterns correlate with positions that get eliminated regardless of how hard people work.

The "all routine" pattern: every email addresses predictable, recurring tasks with no problem-solving or strategic input.

The "all inward" pattern: every email stays within your immediate team with no visibility to other departments or leadership.

The "all reactive" pattern: every email responds to requests from others with no emails where you identified and addressed something proactively.

These patterns don't mean you're performing poorly. They mean your communication doesn't create the kind of organizational visibility that protects positions during cuts.

The documentation opportunity:

If you're doing valuable work that doesn't appear in your email patterns, that's a communication problem. You need to ensure the work that matters reaches people who make decisions about your position.

This might mean copying the right people on emails about significant issues you resolved, documenting problems you caught before they escalated, or summarizing contributions that happen through channels other than email.

Next step:

Review your sent email from the past 30 days today. Count the patterns: asking versus providing, internal versus cross-departmental, problem-solving versus status reporting. Tomorrow you'll complete Resilience Experiments examining which small professional experiments reveal useful information. But first you need to know what your communication patterns reveal about your actual organizational position.