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CC'ing the Boss on Email Makes Employees Feel Less Trusted, Study Finds (hbr.org)
Do you ever loop your boss when having a conversation with a colleague when his or her presence in the thread wasn't really necessary? Turns out, many people do this, and your colleague doesn't find it helpful at all. From an article: My collaborators and I conducted a series of six studies (a combination of experiments and surveys) to see how cc'ing influences organizational trust. While our findings are preliminary and our academic paper is still under review, a first important finding was that the more often you include a supervisor on emails to coworkers, the less trusted those coworkers feel (alternative link). In our experimental studies, in which 594 working adults participated, people read a scenario where they had to imagine that their coworker always, sometimes, or almost never copied the supervisor when emailing them. Participants were then required to respond to items assessing how trusted they would feel by their colleague. ("In this work situation, I would feel that my colleague would trust my 'competence,' 'integrity,' and 'benevolence.'") It was consistently shown that the condition in which the supervisor was "always" included by cc made the recipient of the email feel trusted significantly less than recipients who were randomly allocated to the "sometimes" or "almost never" condition. Organizational surveys of 345 employees replicated this effect by demonstrating that the more often employees perceived that a coworker copied their supervisor, the less they felt trusted by that coworker. To make matters worse, my findings indicated that when the supervisor was copied in often, employees felt less trusted, and this feeling automatically led them to infer that the organizational culture must be low in trust overall, fostering a culture of fear and low psychological safety.
haha! suck it paranoid bastards!
Do you ever loop your boss when having a conversation with a colleague when his or her presence in the thread wasn't really necessary?
Them's fighting words!
BCC FTW
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
... and I might provide some light entertainment for the boss.
And in other news... 'Water is WET'. Film at 11.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Not only does it make it look like you don't trust anyone, but it's completely useless. YMMV, but at my company the boss doesn't even read most of what he's copied on (unless he's expecting it prior) because *everyone* is copying him on *everything*. It just get buried under all the other noise.
That's often kind of the point isn't it?
You don't trust someone to do their job, possibly they've been screwing around or taking their sweet time.
A swift CC to the boss and a "hey, what's the progress on this?" is one way to get it moving.
On the other hand, doing it all the time is poor form if it's really a one to one conversation where escalation isn't needed.
Just assume that every single email that you send is eventually being copied to every single person in the company. Problem solved.
CC'ing the boss isn't meant to be helpful or foster trust. It's so the boss knows I'm doing my assignments and how I'm doing them. Fuck off with your feelings. This is a business, not gender studies class.
If metrics are poor, cc'ng the boss is the only way he will know what you are working on.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Of course, it isn't meant to make them feel trusted.
99% of the time I cc' my boss it's because the co-worker is trying to get me involved in something I shouldn't be, or make a "end-round" my boss.
I don't have time for that shit.
I generally will CC anyone whose name I mention in an email if they aren't already a direct part of the conversation. I've always considered it professional courtesy to do so.
Re:What if they didn't know?
Then it wouldn't really help. The whole point is to say, "The boss is watching, so don't slack off, you jack ass!" If they don't know the boss is watching, then they will behave exactly as if the boss was not watching.
your colleague doesn't find it helpful
What if I don't certain colleagues "helpful" and wish to apply a little pressure? I've had my fill of fake indian masters degrees and IT posers that haven't learned anything new since 1998. I use whatever is at my disposal to motivate them to do their jobs, and when they fuck up and cop out with excuses I make sure the right people see it. That way when the layoff cycle comes around the dead wood is correctly identified.
>"Do you ever loop your boss when having a conversation with a colleague when his or her presence in the thread wasn't really necessary?"
Yes. It is rare, but does happen. And when it does, I usually will ignore the Email and delete it. It is usually when another Director/VP thinks it will motivate me to do something, and I quietly illustrate to them it has the exact opposite effect. If they later ask me about the Email, I will say something like "well, looked like you were trying to talk to the CEO and not me."
1. The first email is only between the two pertinent parties.
2. If there is no response, the second email has the other person's supervisor CC'd.
3. If there is still no response, the supervisor's supervisor is CC'd
4. Repeat until desired results achieved, or reprimanded. (I've yet to be reprimanded).
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Sometimes, like when there are competent people under him, the boss just wants to be kept in the loop. I work with a bunch of good people. We get things done and make things happen. If we didn't CC him he'd have no clue what we were up to and he'd be way behind real quick. Sometimes it takes a while to get something done and impatient people ask the boss, "What's taking so long?" He just doesn't want to look like an idiot and say, "Uhhhhhh....I have no idea what you're talking about." Makes him look incompetent. It isn't a matter of trust, it's just about CYA.
My boss gives me the freedom to handle clients as needed. He requests being kept in the loop for some of the more wealthy clients, but honestly I cc him most email correspondence.
CC'ing my boss ensures that my boss sees the ridiculousness from clients I have to deal with everyday.
I only include the "higher ups" if they specifically requested to be part of the update/email chain or if the person I am trying to contact has been unresponsive through multiple channels (email/phone for suppliers, face to face discussions for internal people).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
The author of an email that cc's their boss should be more worried about the boss's perception than whether the coworker feels less trusted. Copying the boss on an email is often an attempt to create a CYA moment with, "Well, I told you about it," or a passive-aggressive way to tell on a co-worker without taking responsibility or a way of telling a co-worker, "You better do what I'm asking or mommy/daddy are going to come after you."
I used to get copied on stuff all the time and finally told those reporting to me, "Don't copy me on an email unless you expect me to take an action. If I need to be informed about something then send me a direct email with an explanation of why I need to know about it." For some, the directive didn't take until I started taking action based solely on the content of their email.
I have found that CC'ing the boss or other person of authority results in a (quick) reply about 95% of the time. In some companies, without CC'ing an email you are far less likely to get a timely reply; if one at all.
If I write you an email and Cc your boss, then you have done something that I believe needs to be corrected.
You are right to feel less trusted, that is exactly what I am attempting to communicate.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Do you ever loop your boss when having a conversation with a colleague when his or her presence in the thread wasn't really necessary? Turns out, many people do this, and your colleague doesn't find it helpful at all.
Do you remember when story descriptions were constructed from coherent sentences featuring full phrases that included pronouns?
I had supervisor who thought I tried to get the last supervisor fired because I documented everything — and refused to stop documenting everything when he told me to do so after he became supervisor. He told me to cc'd him on all emails because he didn't trust me. So I did. Unlike other people in the department, I had a lot of emails going in and out of my inbox. He got a flood of emails. Since he insisted on being cc'd to my emails, I kept deferring to him for decisions on everything. He gave up on the email and switched to a remote desktop monitoring program.
You have crap people skills and your coworkers likely shake their head internally at you.
Plus, odds are, your boss doesnt want to be CCed in the first place. If you want your boss to know something, write them a summary or present the data in an easily digestible format. Dont make them fish for data in someone else's conversation, wtf are you thinking.
CC'ing the boss is like a child saying "I'm going to tell mommy on you!!"
Where did the money come from for this useless "study"? Everybody knows this. I only CC the boss when either I know he's watching the project, or the person I'm email needs prompting to get their shit done.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"Sponsored Links". That box is annoying AF. Dammit! Shrink the whole comments area or something! There's only a tiny vertical space where the comments are visible, because that box covers the whole right side of the comment content.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
http://bjk5.com/post/718871964... ... Anybody in the org can join any of these email lists. analytics-team@ is usually just team members, but analytics-blackhole@ has all sorts of lookie-loo subscribers who're interested in analytics happenings."
"Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team's "blackhole." [For example: ] analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org.
The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. When you send email to analytics-team@, you expect everyone on the analytics team to read it. Subscribing to analytics-team@ means analytics-related email will land in your priority inbox as soon as it's sent, and you're expected to read it.
The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. When you CC:analytics-blackhole@, you don't expect subscribers to immediately read it. Subscribing to analytics-blackhole@ means you'll receive analytics-related email, but it'll get filtered out of your inbox and you're not expected to read it unless you feel like it.
The approach was derived from how Stripe does it: https://stripe.com/blog/email-...
So, given the original story, maybe this transparency approach has an extra side effect (perhaps unintended) of maintaining trust in an organization by avoiding the "directly CC-ing the boss" effect?
It's not quite BCCing the whole company -- like Tesen joked -- as it is more organized. But essentially the whole company could in theory read (almost) anything with that approach.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The team I work with recently attended a brief refresher course on professional email etiquette...and this exact situation was covered. The recommendation was to always include a short explanation, in the email, of why the boss (or anyone else for that matter) is being cc'd. It actually works too. Once employees are expected to justify the inclusion of the second party, suddenly there are few unnecessary occurrences.
You forgot to CC me your TPS report
I used to CC my boss to get coverage or priority help or if she asked to be in-the-loop on something. For example, a systems outage that prevents 22K employees from doing their jobs for a day. Multiple SVPs were in those sorts of loops and rightly so.
If I CC your boss, it is because you've been unreliable OR you asked for help to get your priorities managed so you can help me. Folks are busy and sometimes their boss doesn't have all the facts when prioritizing.
The key is to let the bosses know when they can help when they actually still CAN HELP. That is what the boss-level is for.
One of the reasons you CC someone up the food chain is because you don't trust the person you're sending the email to to do their job.
Seriously? They needed a 'study' to figure this out? I avoid including anyone's manager (even my own) on any e-mail that doesn't need a Manager's assistance. I might forward an e-mail to my Manager as an 'FYI' especially to avoid the 'why didn't you tell me about this' phenomenon (e.g. where your own boss demonstrates he/she doesn't trust you). And I NEVER include someone else's manager unless I am making it 100% DAMN clear that if the person an e-mail is directed towards isn't helpful I will 'escalate'...so yeah, I use it specifically to demonstrate a level of 'mis-trust'.
And of course I NEVER BCC anyone. I don't know why the 'inventors' of e-mail thought this was a good idea (I understand what a 'BCC' is & the history with physical memos being sent but e-mail was never the same as a 'memo'). I've had people 'BCC' someone & I do a 'reply all' which catches the people BCC'd & I don't catch it & then type something not necessarily 'appropriate' (not rude just not something the BCC'd person should see) & that caused issues. People who use BCC should be shot. Forward the e-mail as an 'FYI' or use CC but you should never use BCC with the commensurate potential for the obvious issues with 'reply all'.
Bear shits in wood. Pope wears funny hat.
My UID is prime!
This shows the boss you are responsive, but also sends a subtle message (to both your boss and the co-worker) that you are above that game. As a boss, my opinion of any subordinate would go down if they resort to such demoralizing behavior. I don't want people like that destroying the morale on my team.
I would rather that I feel trust than you feel trusted, but that's a feeling only you can create by acting in a trustworthy manner and inviting accountability. I welcome the boss being CC'ed on all emails to me if it makes someone feel better about me.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Fear and Low Psychological Safety is the the goal of many a corporation. I worked as a temp for many companies and.. sorry, this is the main theme of most. Management, in their twisted and convoluted minds, they think that somehow they will get more work out of you if you are sad and divided up. Maybe they think that brief socializing is "unproductive" and don't understand that friendly bonds that foster true team spirit are important for good mental health and working better together? Or they think that laughter is counter productive, and rush to see what the "problem" is the second you laugh? (P.S. Stay far away from people who gossip!, Or as you say C.C.)
Or, if you are asking a peer who you do not manage and has his own tasks, to do something you ask, you CC the boss who will resolve priorities. Or, if you talked to the boss and he asked you to ask peer to do said thing, you CC the boss. Generally I expect the boss to be controlling resources and managing priorities, he really ought to be copied on a lot of mails. If that peer is doing exceptional work that he doesn't even have to do, CC'ing the boss is also the way of making sure the boss knows said person is doing really well, I also CC the boss on that sort of thing. I want good people to be incentivized to stay every bit as much as I want to help identify bad people who can be incentivized to leave.
I was nervous about people CCing the boss when I was fresh out of college, but I got over it the hard way. The consequence of NOT CC'ing the boss, in my experience, is people not delivering and the boss blaming ME, and asking why he wasn't CC'd. So now any time I am making a request that involves real work, and asking someone to stop doing what they're doing, I CC the boss.
Honestly the only person with a legitimate reason to complain about CC'ing the boss, is the boss. That has never happened.
... I ever CC'd the boss was like:
To: asshole@suckycompany.com
From: Me
Subject: Your stuff still doesn't work ...
I know that you want to make my firm happy, and you know I do too.
So far, I'm the only one making any positive contributions, which results in your company's performance sucking big time.
Because you are incompetent, I am CC'ing my boss, your boss, and, to get the point across I'm CC'ing YOU.
Please fix this before end of work day Friday or I will be scheduling a meeting with you, me, my boss, and your boss on Monday.
Sincerely,
Me
CC: Me, You, My Boss, Your Boss
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
At more than one place I've worked, our higher-ups have told us to cc them on just about everything. I keep thinking I only need to pester them if we need their guidance or their resources, but I'm told over and over that management wants to have full awareness, and it's a mistake if I don't include them by cc. So it's not that I don't trust my co-workers, it's that my bosses want to be aware of all our interactions and I get in trouble for being discrete.
If people would pay attention and respond to emails without my/their boss CC'd then I wouldn't feel the need to CC him/her. Do your job and I don't have to go over your/our head(s).
because you're either blowing me off or screwing me over. If you see my Boss on an email chain then congratulations, you done fucked up son, and I'm comin' for ya.
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I hate having my boss looped in, because then he wants what I'm doing. I tell him, and even if it's exactly the same thing he told me to do last time, I get told "that's not what I want" and then ... it goes down hill. Despite the fact I love working for my boss, despite the fact I love working for this company, I decided earlier today that "it's time to move on". I've been in IT for multiple decades. I don't have any sort of diva pride - I just want to do the job my boss wants me to do, the way he wants it done. But a constantly moving goal post is a race that gets pretty old after two years, and I'm ready for a new kind of waltz. One where I don't feel like I have three left feet and one of them is in a bucket of cement.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I've been in too many companies where "private conversations" talking frank about issues end up being brought up in other meetings and suddenly "Well, so-and-so says it's easy and can do this" when in reality, nothing of the sort was said. So my philosophy has become, if it involves work, my boss is copied in so he can step in and say "Hey, that's out of our scope, but if you want to talk about it, let's figure out who would actually do this sort of work." , etc. if that means people don't invite me into work email chains, that's fine by me.
When the sender CC's their own boss, it is usually one of four things:
Oh there is a fifth reason, although this could apply to both types: the sender is a complete douchebag.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It works here. People are so lazy that if you don't copy the boss they would just not do anything. When you copy their boss (and sometime yours) those lazy ass will move and do some working finally.
If you are truly working on a team, and not just a bunch of individuals, then CC'ing everyone including the boss is the way to go. If you have a boss that's an arsehat, I could understand the fear. A boss that either leads by example or is also a team player, then it makes sense to include them. I guess I take this for granted, as I have had been a part of a great team for the last 6 years.
Title says it all. CCing the boss isn't too bad if it is informational but terrible when required.
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" explains how supporting true team spirit is a key aspect of a high-performance organization. You can find some good evidence in there for your point.
The authors also explain better ways to manage email. Here are subheadings from the book chapter:
Chapter 33: E(vil) Mail 199
In Days of Yore 199
Corporate Spam 200
What Does "FYI" Even Mean? 200
Is This an Open Organization or a Commune? 201
Repeal Passive Consent 201
Building a Spam-less Self-Coordinating Organization 202
In general, their focus on good use of email is on helping people in organizations self-coordinate. It is more a vision of the manager as supporting good communications within and between teams versus than a manager being a hub of communications. So, to them, lots of CCs on emails suggest the possibility of some sort of organizational dysfunction which could be corrected by training people to be more self-coordinating.
That book is the second item I list here in a curated reading list on creating and sustaining high-performance organizations:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Another book by one of the authors (Tom DeMarco) is listed as the first item: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
But, this is all easier said than done in practice.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
sign only will work no real need to encrypt unless there is.
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I will typically CC the boss if I'm asking for something that should be questioned. For example, if I'm asking for access to a system or application managed by a different team, or card access to a new building, or creation of a new vlan. Usually simply CC'ing the boss is enough to bypass any questions, but in case they do ask "is there approval for this" the boss is already on the chain to say "yes".
When there's a culture of controlling and distrust, CC means "do it now or face the consequences".
When there's a culture of cooperation and trust, CC means everybody being on track what's currently happening. Yes, instead of a random coworker whose duties lies elsewhere, it's then better for your boss to know in case you're calling in sick for a day without that being cause for alarm. You can call in sick in your country, right?
No wonder corporate life is like a huge, tall and black labyrinth when everyone is supposed to be so secretive about what they're doing and whom they're doing it with!
Amen to that. The one thing that's gotten me to start CC'ing the boss back in the day is the fact that if the guy on the other side is not in the same department as you, they'd often just ignore the email entirely unless it's got their manager on CC.
CC'ing the boss is what you do *precisely because* you don't otherwise trust your colleague to respond to or come through on the matter. Of course that makes them feel untrusted, that's the whole point of it.
And in other news, researchers find ursine mammals typically defaecate in arborial landscapes.
I'm a manager of technical people and there are times the boss simply should be cc'd. Of the threads I get cc'd on unexpectedly from a team member, they almost always fall into two categories 1) a decision has to be made that potentially affects multiple teams or is judgment call with no clear winner 2) someone contacted a team member directly looking for long-term work that's a bit excessive without clearing it with me first who needs to make sure no team member is overloaded or that it would impact the main schedule.
The first is simply "I'm sending this one up". Did I need to be cc'd? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how difficult the decision really is and what the impact is.Maybe they could have decide themselves but if the decision is in a gray area then there is no harm in checking just in case I was aware of something else from other team members or outside the team that had an impact. Is that a trust thing? I don't really think so, at worst they're looking for cover if the decision turns out to be wrong so I'll back them up.
The second one is "I want to tell this guy to gtfo and you're going to help me". That may or may not be a trust thing, depends on who else is on the thread and what the load factor of the team member is. Usually a friendly reminder that direct mails to team members do not help schedules if we decide to push back. Think I only once had to tell a team member to always cc me without comment if he was contacted by a particular person until the clue finally sank in that if he wants work done properly, time needs to be set aside for it (not detailed planning, just picking something to defer to make room for a higher priority item).
Computers might be binary but decisions about work are not. Maybe cc'ing the boss will violate trust but if that's a risk then put an explanation why the cc is being added at the start of the mail. Hopefully the explanation is a reasonable one and not just "nyah, nyah, I'm telling teacher/boss" or "I hate you and want to see you thrown under a bus".
Researchers found out that H2O, commonly known as "Water", surprisingly undergoes a phase transition at zero degrees Celsius under normal atmospheric pressure.
The paper is still under review, but our experimental studies on 594 samples of the substance found that liquid H2O becomes solid when cooled below this temperature. The presence of the solid state was confirmed by probing (poking) the substance with a sophisticated testing device (finger).
By testing with different temperature ranges, including randomized temperatures, it was confirmed that the transition happens at or close to zero degrees Celsius.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I regularly CC my manager on e-mails which I send.
The primary reasons are:
1. The person I'm communicating with isn't performing their duties, and I'm not the one who's going to be thrown under the bus.
2. Someone is attempting to get information from me and refuse to go through the proper channels.
3. Someone wants information in which they don't have the required business justification.
4. I'm passing praise onto the person [I'll also CC their manager as well].
If I need to BCC my manager, it's because I don't want to take the time to forward the e-mail to him.
Primary reason is:
1. Something he should know, but doesn't need to take action on.
I have heard management saw, "if you BCC management on an e-mail, you're attempting to get the receiver in trouble". I countered with, "no, if you and their management get an e-mail from me directly saying their fucking up, THAT'S when I'm trying to distant myself from that department."
However with reading the summary, it appears that CCing someone on an e-mail is a trigger for the receiver. If they close their e-mail client, is that the same as a safe-room or safety pin?
Seriously. Nobody knew this?
I'll go a step further: You're no longer exchanging a view, you are tacitly indicating that the correspondance is now one way: "me (and the boss) to you". Cc'ing any senior means you are at best a 'toady' sucking up to the senior or a 'bully' using the senior's e-presence to quell any discussion.
The action also has side effects. It can clog a senior's inbox losing useful correspondance in the 'noise' of all the frivolous Cc's.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I CC the boss because I don't trust those lying back-stabbing motherfuckers.
Learned my lesson the first time somebody tried to sabotage one of my projects and nearly got me fired.
It's SOP with my current boss. I CC him on all of my stuff to keep him in the loop. My previous boss didn't have that policy. And, when I CCd her, it was usually because things weren't getting done, and she could light a much hotter fire under that person's butt than I could.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Unless it is a status email or email where the party I'm emailing knows the info has to go to the boss (as he may want say) I don't CC, but frankly over the years, I've done this when, frankly I _DON'T_ trust the person!
I've had more than one situation over the gasp 40 YEARS I've been working where you'd tell coworker X, and they would deny you did, and you'd have to jump through hoops to make your manager (and sometimes their manager) believe you
The problem is often solved by "CC:Their Manager, Your Manager"
Gee, you mean it makes the person say "CharlieG doesn't trust me" - well DUH.
I won't do it until the first time I'm under the bus because of you, but after that, I'm trying to not only cover MY ass, but also send the message "No, I DON'T trust you" - not only to you, but to my manager and YOUR manager that I no longer trust you.
BTW, there was also probably an email to my manager (in my case, my 'manager' is the CEO), and your manager about why they were being CC'd (aka how you threw me/the project under the bus) that YOU were not CC'd. When you get to the level I'm at, this is usually about a person who reports to a fellow manager, and the CC/BCC might even be going to the CEO/HR as part of a documentation trail
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Please don't cc me on everything. It only serves to clutter my inbox with emails that are not actionable. I only want to be cc'd if I need to be aware of the situation (something is not getting done on time, or may require my assistance with senior management).
I do this a lot actually.
Its very rare that I do this because I want the boss person to get involved. I do to keep them from swinging by my office and interrupting whatever I'm doing so they can ask how that particular activity is going (at which point I have to dig up that exact email to refresh my own memory). It also keeps them happier with me, which in the long run keeps me happier.
If I want them to *participate*, I'll add them on the recipient list, not the cc's.
...never let your boss get blindsided by anything you are even remotely related to if you can help it.
If you have information, reservations, disagreements with anyone, co-workers, customers, no matter, loop your boss in on it. The Boss is there to coordinate and clear obstacles so that you can do your job and so the company can achieve its goals (at least in a healthy, sane organization).
There are always two sides at least to everything and each "side" will go up the other chain of command. If you don't keep your management involved, they will look like fools when asked about it in their meetings and they have no knowledge or response. That will then come back to you.
If your colleagues are professionals, they will understand and will do it themselves.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Is this from the department "open doors"?
Please login to access my lawn
Is what my lawyer father always told me...
In this case if he got those emails and disseminated the information to networkBoy *prior* to receiving HRLegal confidentiality training I'd argue it was of no fault of his own! :p
I won't apply to work at Subway then.
Yes, I'm THAT guy. I've found that being a dick is rather freeing.
It's for visibility and awareness- not lack of trust.
This goes both ways. I have a couple dozen employees. I trust all of them (otherwise they wouldn't work for me.. Right?). This leads me to wonder why I am occasionally included in some of these mundane email threads. Occasionally I will reply with, "People. Why am I included in this conversation?"
Word of thought. If your organization is run properly then CCing your boss probably annoys him/her too.
Do you honestly believe the boss reads all of those emails? (S)He would probably prefer that you cut it out, but they don't want to actually say that because it "stifles communication".