Emailing Seniors: the Etiquette Nobody Teaches

Your emails are the most-read thing you will produce all summer. Seniors experience you substantially as an inbox entry, read on a phone, between meetings, in eleven seconds and the difference between a junior whose emails are a pleasure and one whose emails are work is visible within a week. Nobody teaches the genre. Here it is.

The five rules of the genre

• Answer first. The conclusion in the first line, support underneath. 'Model updated, EPS moves from 1.02 to 1.04, driver is the tax rate; detail below.' Seniors read top-down and stop when satisfied; structure for the stop.
• Subject lines are status lines. 'Project Falcon · model updated · 2 questions' tells the reader everything before opening. 'Quick question' and 'Update' tell them nothing and get opened last, the same law that governs the external cold emails covered in the site's outreach article.
• Questions come numbered, with defaults. Closed questions, numbered, each with a proposed answer: 'Unless you prefer the 20-day average, I will use the one-day premium.' A default converts a request for thought into a request for a yes and seniors answer yeses from taxis.
• Attachments carry their own discipline. Right file, right version, named so a stranger could file it: date, project, document, version. Open the attachment before sending, per mistake four in the intern-mistakes list.
• Brevity is respect. Five lines is a long internal email. If it needs ten, it probably needs a call instead.

The model status email

One email, whole genre · status, questions with defaults, next step

Notice the last line: the next step, pre-announced. It closes the loop before it opens and it is the written form of the anticipation habit the first-90-days article describes.

Chasing, cc discipline and tone

Chasing: once, politely, after a genuinely reasonable interval and route the chase to the associate rather than re-pinging the MD; the associate exists partly to be that channel. Cc discipline: your direct associate errs on being included, because surprising your own chain is the sin, not over-informing it; never skip levels without a reason you could say out loud and never use bcc for politics, because bcc games are discovered and remembered. Tone: no exclamation-mark enthusiasm, no emoji upward, no 'just checking in', which is a chase pretending not to be; say what you need. And the thank-you economy runs on brevity: 'Thanks, done' outperforms a paragraph of gratitude every time.

When not to email at all

The genre's final rule is knowing its limits. Anything urgent, anything nuanced, anything already three messages deep: stand up and walk over, or call. The ten-message thread that should have been ninety seconds at a desk is a daily sight on every floor and the junior who breaks the chain by appearing in person reads as someone with judgement about bandwidth, which is the actual skill all of this etiquette is a proxy for. Email fluency feeds directly into how you are discussed at conversion time, per the conversion article, because the written trail is the part of your summer everyone can re-read. If you want your own drafts pressure-tested against the genre before you start, that fits naturally in the IBD Recruiting Review.

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Raphael Tressieres

Former Executive Director in TMT Investment Banking at Nomura and M&A banker at BNP Paribas. Top-rated mentor with 300+ sessions. About