“The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing” from a study quoted in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman.
It continues: “The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called “automated social hierarchy detection” developed at Columbia University. When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.”
So, unless you are trying to hide your hierarchical role in a gang, but want rather to establish some social status, do not respond to emails immediately. Let a few hours pass before responding… this also has the added benefit to make you less addicted to your phone or email and have less remorse if you take more time to respond!
