Note: Originally written as a leveling note to my direct reports — sharing in case the framing is useful for other leaders.

Cascading is part of your job as a leader and as a major information conduit for your team.

Sometimes you get notes about a change at the company. And those notes might say things like: “please cascade to your teams as appropriate.”

I wanted to clarify what “cascading” means in this context. Many leaders know and practice this well, so please take this as foundational education on terminology and expectations — not as an indictment or general criticism. Sometimes you just have to say the basics, even when you think 50%+ of the audience already knows them.

What cascading actually is

Cascading is the practice, by a leader, of being aware that you receive information regularly (through emails, staff meetings, the internet, Slack, whatever) that your team may not know — and deciding what to do with it in regards to informing them. They may know some of it inconsistently — some people may know it, some may not. Some may know it with flavors, spins, or history that others don’t have.

The term cascading comes from envisioning a set of waterfalls. Water flows over the first one — does it pool and stay, or does it keep cascading all the way down? It’s a lot more than just “cascading,” though. It’s synthesizing, filtering, editorializing, deleting, and maybe even cascading.

Emails that come to you as a leader are clearly places where you may have information your team doesn’t, and they’re worth digging into. But the other information sources you have apply as well — Google Docs you get added to, URLs other leaders forward, Slack threads you see, hallway conversations. I’ll focus on emails for the rest of this note, but it’s no different for any of the others.

Questions to ask when something hits your inbox

When you get an email like the ones I’m referring to, you should think:

  • Does my team need to know this?
  • If they do need to know it, how will they feel about it? Is it written in a way that’s digestible for them?
  • Does it have specific relevance to the specific job of my team?
  • If I forwarded this raw, would they view it as spam, unrelated to their jobs?

The choices you have

After considering those questions, you have some basic choices:

  • Forward it on raw with no comment — just “FYI.”
  • Forward it on with comments that explain more context, often about how this may (or may not) affect your team.
  • Write whole new content that explains what happened and its implications. (This is rare.)
  • Just delete it as something that isn’t relevant to your team — to preserve their time and not distract them. This is common and should be embraced.
  • Some combination of the above — but only to certain parts of your team.
  • Decide how far down it should go. Maybe just to your directs, and have them go through the same cascading thought process you just did. Or maybe it’s more efficient to forward to whatever the alias is for your whole team.
  • Ask the sender for more info before you can make any of the above decisions.

Why this matters

Over time, as leaders go “up” in the management hierarchy, we become more aware of more strategic information. As teams grow, layers build, and new employees come in, the people “below” us are less and less aware of the strategic context. Over time, this creates gaps in their ability to execute. At the same time, as we grow, leaders get exposed to more and more information that we should rightfully just delete and not forward — filtering is a key part of the job as well.

Companies that don’t think about this go two really bad places:

  1. They forward everything to everyone, email becomes spammy, and people build filters on everyone@ or eng@ to make the noise stop.
  2. They forward only to leaders, but the leaders don’t own the responsibility to make the decisions that need to be made — and employees end up feeling like mushrooms, doing their job in the dark with no context.

I hope this gives you some food for thought about what your role as a leader can be.

— Mark