Secrets, Like Water, Flow Downhill

photo by The Rocketeer

It never ceases to amaze that ‘leadership’ teams continue to hoard information and attempt to keep secrets from their organizations.

The rationale is (pick one or get creative and combine a couple):

• It’s sensitive information
• If it gets out someone may get hurt
• It has the opportunity to be misconstrued
• Nothing is final, things could change
• ‘They’ don’t really need to know
• It will be disruptive, people will lose focus

Information is power and it’s human nature to try to stockpile power.  But it’s also human nature to want to let others know that you are on the inside.  That is often a more powerful motive.  Thus, information leaks.  ALWAYS.  Admins talk.  Executives tell their non-executive friends.  They tell their friends.  Before long everyone knows.

So why aren’t we more transparent?

Presumably you hired people to join your team because they were competent, responsible and had a lot of value to bring to the company.  Shouldn’t you trust them?

Let’s look at the pros and cons.

Pros

• There may be some things where knowing will cause more damage (nuclear passcodes are all that is coming to mind)

Um, help me out here…

Cons

• You become a boss who is to be obeyed rather than a leader who inspires people to follow willingly
• You look like a fool and, like the boy who cried wolf, don’t get the benefit of the doubt again
• People share the valuable information even more widely because it’s taboo
• You fail to get potentially valuable inputs from people lower in the organization
• You treat people like children, they’re going to act like children
• The ‘us vs. them’ gap widens dramatically and work becomes just a job to ‘them’
• People are more hurt when you don’t show trust in them than in whatever the news holds

Your company’s goal should be to best your competition.  To do that you need everyone pulling in the same direction.

Hoarding information only succeeds in creating rifts and demotivating.  Often what you were trying to prevent (hurt feelings, misinformation, information finding its way out of the company, etc.)  happens anyway and in a far more severe manner.

People have active imaginations and will create a situation far more dire than the one from which you were hoping to protect them.  Or they’ll put their own spin on it and pass it along.  Remember the game of telephone you played as a kid?  Or when you don’t give people the trust and respect initially they won’t be likely to respect your desire to keep the information private once they know.

So let it out.

• You’ll ensure everyone knows the same thing
• That all the information is as accurate as it can be
• You can share the caveats that should come with the information
• You reinforce the fact that you all play for the same team
• And, shockingly, by sharing you’ll ensure that the information is more tightly controlled outside of your organization

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