Leaders, generally speaking, do not give enough credit to their employees.  They seem to forget what it was like as they moved up the ladder themselves.  They seem to forget how aware they were of the problems facing the business.  They seem to forget what it was like to be on the front lines and deal with the problems facing the business every day. 

Leaders also tend to believe that they are the first to recognize the symptoms of something being amiss in their organization.  They seem to think that the symptoms they are seeing about business performance have not yet become visible to the average person in the office. 

Leaders learn early to withhold information…sometimes due to confidentiality…sometimes to maintain power…and sometimes to manage the impact on employees…making it least disruptive to the business.  The great fallacy is that, in reality, it creates further distraction by creating a general sense of distrust. 

Finally, leaders also tend to think that there is alot of information which they should not share with employees.  In most cases this is because they feel that employees are not able to handle the information.  They feel that panic would ensue and employees will flee the sinking ship, or that some bad message would get out to the customer.  So they hide it, they gloss over it, and they talk around it.

The irony is that generally the leader is NOT the first to know about many of the problems in the business.  In fact, by the time the leader informs the general populace of these insights, the employees already know, and have known for some time.  In many cases they were the first to know.  During that time, in which the leader has chosen to NOT acknowledge the existence of the problem, he/she has been deemed by the employees to be unobservant or, worse, incompetent.

It once took me 2 years to earn the trust and commitment of the people at one facility of mine.  I remember the day I finally did.  I had just completed a quarterly Town Hall meeting.  In that meeting I reported on our progress toward key goals and pointed out that we were not achieving the goals.  It was not a pretty picture.  Most of the news that day was bad, and it was the first time I had had to report bad news to that team of people.  After the meeting the General Manager of that facility came up to me and said, “Today you earned their trust.”  I asked him, “Why today?”  He said, “Because you were up front with them about the bad news.  Your ability to recognize and speak about the bad news means to them that they can also believe you about the good news.  They already knew the things you spoke about.  Had you avoided the subject they would not have felt that you were not being forthright with them and they would have questioned the validity of the other news you had to report.”

Leaders learn early to withhold certain information from employees, customers, regulators, owners, etc.  It is learned under the guise of being a means of managing the impact on them and couching the dissemination of the information in such a way as to make it most palatable and least disruptive to the business.  It is meant to keep them from being distracted and to keep them focused on their goals and objectives.  And keeping focus is an important aspect of leadership. 

The great fallacy is that, in reality, withholding information serves to cause distraction because it creates a general sense of distrust among employees.  It IS a form of deception and people FEEL it that way.  They know what is really going on.  When you tell them something different they begin to lose trust in you and then they begin to wonder what else is being “sugar-coated”.  They then start to spend more time trying to figure out what is really going on rather than on doing their work. 

Moral of the story…be straight with your employees.  They know more than you think, and they can handle ALOT more.  Spend your time being up front about the issues your organization faces and the plans to address them.  This will serve to maintain trust and also enlist their support.