Want Bad News Early? Make it Easier To Tell You
What leaders can do to surface risks while they are still manageable
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
There is a line I walk in every audit and risk committee and board meeting. Management mentions something that has not happened yet that is worrying them, and I want to ask more about it. I’m careful about the follow up information I ask for because I know where it can lead. I spent years on the management side of these meetings, and when something is raised that’s still emerging, what can come back is more questions, more reporting and more work. All of that can discourage someone from raising the next thing early.
I want management to tell me anyway. The earlier the committee or board knows about something, the more we can support management to prevent the worst from happening. A leader of a team faces the same trade-off. You want people to trust you enough to tell you what is coming, and you know that telling you can create work for them. If you know about things that are on the horizon, you can help prevent the worst case scenario and support teams to ensure they manage the issue well.
This is the skill of adaptive stability, fostering trust that teams can tell you what’s coming and responding in a proportionate way that doesn’t discourage future disclosure. Your foresight is supported when people bring you what they can see coming, and you need flexibility to take in something unsettling without overreacting to it.
Leaders set the tone
Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken studied what they called “organisational silence”, that tendency to stay quiet about things employees can see going wrong when that information could be useful or people would like to voice it. What they found is that the reasons usually start with the leader.
One factor they identified is the common belief that the people in charge are best placed to judge what matters, which gives the message to everybody below them that their view is not needed. Another is the belief that a good team is a team that agrees, so when somebody disagrees it feels like a sign that something has gone wrong.
So, knowing that, cultivating people’s confidence to tell you information early is a delicate exercise and one that has to be treated with care because as leaders, it is often useful to hear about the thing somebody is not yet sure about.
Four ways to make it easier to disclose
A leader of teams can combat reluctance to speak up by asking the same question of everyone in every one-on-one: “What is worrying you that is not being spoken about?”.
Once the person opens up about something they’re not sure about, it’s important to be deliberate about your response. Even if you’ve asked nicely for an extra paper on the topic they weren’t expecting to do, it’s likely that next time they will wait until they are sure, because being sure is less work.
It’s common to reward people coming to leaders with a problem and a suggested solution at the same time. Sometimes an early sign of a problem does not yet have a solution. If you expect one when you are told about it, people are more likely to wait to see what happens before they tell you.
If someone lets you know about something and you have said you’ll think about it, it’s good to circle back to let them know what you think about it. If you looked into it and decided to leave it, say so. When nothing comes back, people assume that telling you made no difference, and they are not wrong, because nothing they can see has happened.
Accepting that not everything will turn out to be something to watch
Making early warning easier to disclose is likely to mean you will hear about more things that turn out to be nothing, and some of what you hear will be wrong. There is no easy way to sort the useful signals from the noise before you hear them. But you will get early warning about the small number of things that mattered, while they were still small enough to do something about.
What does it cost someone on your team to bring you something they are not sure about yet?
