Mark Cuban says he doesn’t phone and prefers email

“No, I don’t make calls,” said the elder Shark tank star and owner of the Dallas Mavericks in a TikTok video posted by Masterclass. “You know, I’ll communicate with you via email and believe me, I do this all the time. I’m really good at it.”

But Cuban’s logic for his propensity to use email over the phone is very different from that of younger generations. He said conversing via email gives him more time to craft a thoughtful response.

“I will give you more complete answers than if it was over the phone,” said Cuban, whose fortune is estimated at $6 billion. “And if we do it over the phone, I’m going to forget half of what we talked about because I have so much to do.”

While Cuba is no longer on display Shark tank and sold his majority stake in the Mavericks, he is still very busy he ran Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company and acted as an investor and advisor to the dozens of companies he invested in during his time on the show.

Meanwhile, Gen Z prefers email or text messages because they look forward to talking on the phone. A Study 2024 shows that nearly a quarter of the generation is so reluctant to talk on the phone that they never answer calls. A college in the UK just last year started a course aimed at helping Generation Z overcome their fear.

While it’s always easy to make fun of younger generations for their professional quirks, the hesitation of some is actually a deep-rooted fear called “telephobia.” This form of phone anxiety can lead to increased heart rate, nausea, tremors and difficulty concentrating, according to Very good spirit.

“This speaks to a broader fatigue with immediacy and urgency, where people are tired of the culture of hassle and obsession with efficiency,” Zoya Tarasovaanthropologist within a consumer knowledge agency Canvas8said previously Fortune. “People are quietly rebelling against this immediacy by taking their time to answer these calls. »

Other business leaders have even said Fortune that this tendency towards telephobia has hurt their results. Casey Halloran, CEO and co-founder of an online travel agency Tourismsaid that in its 25 years in business, management has “never seen anything like a generation gap” between older and younger travel agents in the way they make phone calls. He also said combating telephobia was a “frequent and uncomfortable topic” at his company, with management recognizing that its younger travel agents were recording fewer than 50% of calls compared to older employees.

“When it came to solutions, we went through extensive training, incentives, observed calls with our seasoned reps and even hired a corporate psychologist,” Halloran said previously. Fortune. “After more than two years of struggle, we are almost on the verge of throwing up our hands and adopting SMS and WebChat instead of continuing to fight an uphill battle.”

Still, for his own professional purposes, Cuban says he prefers emails to phone calls because he can go back and reference what he said.

“If we do it by email, I can always look it up,” he added.

What Research Tells Us About Communication Styles at Work

Like most business approaches, sending emails instead of talking on the phone has pros and cons.

Research Recruitment firm Robert Walters shows that more than half of younger generation professionals find instant messaging or email, rather than calls or meetings, to be the best way to “get things done”, demonstrating how ineffective they think talking on the phone can be. It’s the “it could have been an email” mentality.

“Younger generations are less likely to spend hours in a restaurant or cafe when they can have a quick chat online,” writes Emilie Vignon, associate director of Robert Walters California, in the 2024 study. To be sure, Vignon also said there are also “disadvantages” to conversing only via email or text.

“Face-to-face interactions build meaningful connections and provide the opportunity to communicate non-verbal cues, strengthening trust and relationships with customers and colleagues,” added Vignon. “The subtleties of body language, facial expressions and tone of voice contribute to a deeper understanding and connection that often cannot be fully conveyed through text messages or even video chats. »

Of course, others research from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the University of Chicago, as well as studies by McKinsey & Co., support calls can help resolve issues faster than an email, especially since employees spend nearly a third of their time on email. A 2022 study by researcher David J. Bouvier of DePaul University also shows that email allows easy sharing of information and can reduce stress.