I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them   shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared.

Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play:

1. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of unimportant mail from below, which were now being deleted by the subordinate (and harming the latter’s productivity).
2. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of important mail from below, which were now intercepted and handled in more timely fashion by his subordinate in the latter’s line of duty.
3. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of mail from other organizations (not his own group) that were now sent directly instead to his subordinate for handling.

We could go on, but the main thing is that these scenarios differ significantly in what they tell us of the organization’s work processes. In scenario 1, the useless mail kept coming, and an expensive management resource was being used as a “human shield” to protect the VP. In scenario 2, the addition of the lower manager was causing a re-division of work in a sensible way, freeing the VP – presumably – to do other tasks. Scenario 3 tells us that the appointment was accompanied by a redefinition of workflows in the larger organization.

And then there is a possible fourth scenario, which thankfully did not happen in this case: the load on the VP could have stayed the same, while his helper would have had a similar load. This can happen if the organization is so smitten with over-communication that everyone would copy both managers, quite unnecessarily. It is an electronic version of Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. More employees – more available time to do email!