Yes, "leadership" by email. It's becoming pervasive throughout the military and is I believe an unintended consequence of constant communication.
"Leadership" by email is indeed a growing and pervasive trend in the Military, in Industry (especially large corporations), and sadly from what I've seen and heard from my own DS - at USMMA. It's also quite ineffective and pretty much an "oxymoron". I 'll continue to say this and talk about it until someone can show me an example where a group has been "inspired to greatness and accomplishment" by email, twitter, or social media of any sort.
I say this as someone who has been in the tech industry for 28 years now and who had email before it was email, etc. Don't get me wrong, I've seen email and social media used very effectively to keep leaders connected with their "troops" over the years. In fact I used to marvel how fast and effectively Bill Gates would use it to get the word out as to his views and get feedback on them from the then over 8,000 Microsoft employees in the mid-90's (15+ years ago). I used to love being able to send status on what was going on at our field site to my boss's boss's boss upon his request via a PROFS "note" 26 years ago at Sperry and how much time and effort is saved.
I could go on but the key point's here are:
1) Gate's efforts were effective and a part of his leadership style for sure, however they were only a part of it. Before he was able to effectively capitalize on the technology to short circuit layers of bureaucracy, etc without creating lots of negative, unintended consequences, the insensitive, one-way direction email communications can create if abused - he needed to and did create a corporate culture that was effective, homogeneous and supportive of the use of such technologies and approaches - and totally intolerant of abuses of the convenience that technology enables.
2) In the numerous companies that now utilize these technologies, etc. the first level of Senior/Executive Management usually set that same sort of tone for their down-line in order to modulate the sorts of things that KP2001 alludes to with regard to "over-flowing" In Boxes. I for one would love to see the next version of MS Outlook to include the deletion of the "Reply All" option as I find it the item that enables the most abuse of email. When I was one of those first level Senior/Executive Managers at a very large corporation, I tried to take 2-4 hours once every other week to go back through my in box and find emails from young, rising stars who had basically used the "reply all" on an email or item to accomplish that key learned bureaucratic skill - "CYA", and let them know in the end all they had done was alert me to a fact they might want to rethink. That fact being that now instead of now focusing solely on how they could succeed and in so doing propel the organization and their careers forward, they were also spending time and effort insulating themselves,
though not the organization, from potential failures which might slow their rise through the ranks. In other instances when the abuse was less obvious I would simply reply to them with a short email that said something on the order of:
"Why did you include myself and XX people on this note? The reasons to send someone a note have not changed just because over the last 20 years technology is now in place so you do not need to ask an administrative assistant to type and distribute it. Those reasons being: 1)to advise them of a decision or action needed by them and it's deadline; 2) to advise them of a decision or action you will be making and ask for advice and input and when such input is needed by; 3) to inform a community of interest of a decision, event or policy change that applies to them even though no action is required on their part at this time. The reason I'm sending you this note is I can't tell which of these three reasons caused you to send it to me vice a shorter list of people which I note includes not only those managers in your direct chain up to myself but also XX other members of my management team. As I now get over 250 emails on any given day, in order to be responsive it's imperative that I keep internal correspondence down to items that truly require my participation and they be direct. Please let me know if any further action is required by myself on this item and if so what you believe it to be; Thanks"
Sorry for the ramble but this is a pet peeve - one which now I am a senior executive in a mid-size (800+ employee) corporation vice a huge (100,000+ employee) corporation, I see much less frequently. However, it's clearly something that is eroding the effectiveness of many aspiring young leaders and otherwise tech-savvy progressive organizations today - IMO. I believe that at some point (hopefully sooner rather than later), this sort of thing will need to be actually taught as part of the leadership and ethics curricula that someone like Capt. Bonnadonna teaches at the USMMA.