Cascading Messages

I was reminded today why I'm a fan of cascading messages. Let me explain.

Cascading messages are basically messages that cascade through an organization, from the top down, through managers to their direct reports. While I'm also a big believer in transparency, I also believe there's a time and place for controlling a message. Sometimes it's really important to be deliberate in what you say.

I learned today that someone at my Credit Union forwarded an "all employee" email message from our CEO, to a newspaper reporter outside the organization. The message from our CEO was important and employees needed to hear it. But should anyone have a reasonable expectation that such "blast" emails would never leave the organization? When the CEO of IBM sends something like that out to every employee, does he really believe the email will, in all cases, stay "in the family?" I'm guessing not.

So, it seems to me, there are several ways to avoid this situation. One way is to avoid using email and go instead to a cascading message. The CEO tells the VP's who tell the Directors who tell the Managers and so on. Confidentiality is stressed all along the way and each person who receives the message feels a responsibility to their own Supervisor to maintain it.

Isn't there some old saying about never writing something in an email you wouldn't want your grandmother to read? Or something... Anyway, the point is, you should probably not have any expectation of privacy or confidentiality with email, especially when that expectation is not specifically called-out in the message.

Now, all that being said, I think whoever did this showed poor judgement. I don't know any of the circumstances around it so don't know the reasoning behind this person's actions so, on the surface, it certainly looks like bad judgement. But still, I personally wouldn't trust that 250 people would all exercise similarly good judgement. That's a stretch.