For example, usually every junior person knows a lot about the project they are in charge of/involved in (and maybe how it aligns with the company’s strategy) and very little about other projects within the engineering organisation.
On the other hand, for an executive, it is important to be aware of what projects employees work on (with much less detail) in order to assess which areas are working and which areas need changes.
I am curious what methods larger companies employ to ensure the right level of information flows up the chain.
Junior people almost never give senior people the unedited truth because doing so is a good way to end up unemployed. Instead, junior people figure out what senior people want to hear and tell them that instead.
In my experience, employees get told which project to work on by management, usually through a formal budget / roadmap process which allocates resources to the initiatives being pushed by different stakeholders such as marketing, sales, IT (e.g. for maintenance projects), etc.
So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in.
What makes it through these different sieves depends on the company culture and what is considered the "right" level of information. In the worst cases, bad news will be edulcorated, then removed, until every line on the dashboard is green. In more result-driven companies, what makes it to the top is what is susceptible to impact business, so it's going to be the project delays and other bad news. But this process is like the "auto-summarize" feature in Word: a lot of nuance gets lost in the different layers and there's alsways a risk of ending up with nonsense. There's also a lot of mediation being done by middle management.
The closest I've come to direct feedback from the junior employees to the execs at large (>10k FTE) companies is when execs tour the office and come take a look at the grunts in the trenches (this will happen once or twice a year). Inevitably there's an awkward roundtable with a chosen team (usually the one working on the most visible project) where the exec asks each person in the room "what is blocking you and what can I do to help you" while that person's boss and grand-boss glare at them from the back of the room, silently promising retribution to anyone who raises any actual issue.
In general, I'd say it's part of the exec's job to ensure that the right sort of culture is set where individuals feel empowered to surface relevant information. This includes trying to make sure that people feel safe enough to surface issues, getting rid of people that aren't good about responding to feedback, etc.
As a corollary of this, you can tell when an exec is bad since not only do people snark, but the same topic of snark lasts for years and years.
There's also a part of their job to have the right organization structures in place such that if a piece of information should really get resolved at a lower level, it does. If a lot of information is having to be resolved by an exec, it probably means an organizational refactoring should probably be happening in the first place.
I don’t think I’ve seen good examples, except in stating that there’s a culture of transparency and inclusion and then not shooting the messenger that points out things that need improvement. Just describing that it’s not easy and likely not possible to get all of the right info, only some of it.
They made safety absolute highest priority. It was a goal that the unions and managers didn't disagree on. The processes were designed to empower lower ranked people to override when things were getting dangerous, and the CEO had to know within a few hours whether an accident happened. Long story short, this put in the processes to let information flow up the chain rapidly.
Again, the key is the right information. It's possible to have all kinds of junk go up when everyone can talk to the CEO. Managers act as abstraction layers for information for a good reason.
The story also says that once the process was in place, other information like optimizations went up the chain and profited them millions. But you want to set a standard that only really important information should go up this path.
I think one main task of executives is to build up the formal and informal information channels to gater intel for decisions.
However, to mitigate these kind of problem, pick a junior having a more or less same vision as you, plant the person into the team you wish to spy, and have them report to you.