The CC Epidemic: How Email Reveals Organizational Immaturity | You Don’t Need an Audience. You Need Accountability.
You can tell a lot about an organization by how many people are CC’d on a single email.
If your inbox is filled with updates you don’t need and conversations you’re not involved in, that’s not just annoying—it’s diagnostic.
The number of CCs is a direct reflection of how much trust and clarity exists inside your org.
And when it’s out of control? It’s a symptom of something deeper:
- No one knows who owns what
- People don’t trust others to follow through
- Everyone’s hedging, covering, and documenting just in case
It’s not communication. It’s cover fire.
The Root Problem Isn’t Email
It’s structure.
If you find yourself constantly being copied on things you don’t need to see, don’t shrug it off. It’s your job to fix it.
You’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
If you’re copied on 20% of what’s flying around, your team is buried under the other 80%. That’s a productivity problem—and a leadership one.
CC sprawl means one of two things:
- No one knows who’s actually responsible
- No one believes the responsible person will actually do it
Either way, you’ve got a trust issue. An accountability issue. A structure issue.
What I Did at SHIELD Illinois
Early at SHIELD Illinois, I got a tongue-in-cheek “Razzie”-style award:
“Email Vigilante.”
Why? Because I made it my mission to shut the CC madness down.
I would:
- Move people from CC to BCC—blatantly
- Reply-all just to say, “Why is everyone on this thread?”
- Call it out in meetings
- Say out loud: “Make CCing someone taboo.”
People laughed at first. I don’t think most of the team got it.
But I wasn’t fighting email. I was fighting scale.
We were at 50 people. If this many messages were flying around already, what was it going to look like at 150? At 350?
Unworkable.
You have to nip that behavior in the bud early. And early is today.
Don’t Use CCs as a Crutch
Most people CC their boss to “keep them in the loop.”
Others CC their boss’s boss—or the whole chain—thinking it will move things faster.
Let me be clear:
If CCing the Chairman is the only way to get something done… you’ve got a much bigger problem.
CC isn’t a shortcut for escalation. It’s a way to defer responsibility. And it usually signals that no one actually owns the outcome.
The Fix Starts With You
As a leader, you have to model what good communication looks like.
- Actively discourage unnecessary CCs
- Remove yourself from threads you don’t need
- Call out overuse in meetings
- Normalize BCCing instead of letting threads sprawl
- Ask, “Who owns this?” instead of “Who else should be looped in?”
You don’t need an audience.
You need accountability.
And if your team doesn’t feel empowered to own the outcome—or if they feel like they need permission from the top—you have to fix that.
Want fewer emails? Build a stronger org.
Because until ownership is clear, everyone’s going to keep hedging with CCs.