This may only work if you're me, but ...

My workplace performance took a huge upswing about a month ago. My boss sat me down and told me that I was annoying and upsetting various management people - who had no lack of annoyance factor themselves, but were after all the management. He told me to engage the public relations skills I'd shown in my volunteer work with Wikipedia.

Turns out this was the magical key - just by thinking of my emails as PR communications, and thinking of my job title not as "senior system administrator" but as "senior system administrator and operations team public relations", I'm charming and delighting people while the substance of the message remains the same. (Recent example: leaving a high-up marketer delighted and pleased that we'd blocked their broken effectively-open-relay "email a friend" form when it had been used for a spam run, and that the company would not be email blackholed a second time.) And it turns out that about half the job is in fact dealing with others.

Now I just need to remember to keep up with the machine-tending that is the first half of my job ...