We have got to stop infantilizing employees.
As managers, we have to understand that not everybody will be happy with our decisions. But that doesn’t mean we need to hide the truth from them.
Too often, we try to hide uncomfortable decisions from our teams—sometimes through policies, sometimes through vague explanations—with the goal of avoiding the messiness of making people uncomfortable.
The problem is that this creates a culture of hiding information from employees.
To make it worse, we sometimes use management speak to dance around what is actually happening. Employees see through it. They know when they’re not getting the whole story, and they’re left dissatisfied and distrustful of management.
We traded the disgruntled employee for a long-term lack of trust.
And we missed an opportunity to develop the employee.
Part of being a manager is helping people understand difficult decisions. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with those decisions. But explaining the tradeoffs, constraints, and reasoning helps employees understand how decisions get made.
If we continually protect employees from uncomfortable truths, we create a cycle where we assume they can’t handle those truths. Then management has to keep dancing around them.
It is like being an overprotective parent.
This sucks for managers because we constantly have to figure out how much of the truth we can say. And it sucks for employees because when information is missing, people fill in the gaps themselves.
What they imagine is often worse than what actually happened.
When we signed up to be managers, we signed up for some of the messiness of working with people. We have to own that.
So why don’t we start opening up more?
Tell employees why management made a decision. Explain the constraints. Explain the tradeoffs. Tell them when there wasn’t a great option available.
There are obviously things we can’t share—private employee information, confidential business information, legal matters, or decisions that genuinely aren’t final yet.
But “this might make people uncomfortable” should not be one of the reasons we keep something from them.
It may make employees uncomfortable to hear the truth. It may also make managers uncomfortable to explain their decisions.
That’s part of the job.
We didn’t go into leadership because it was supposed to be easy. When we accepted the job, we also accepted that we would have to make hard decisions and that not everybody would be happy with us.
Some employees will still disagree. Some may be angry.
That’s okay.
The goal isn’t to make employees happy with every decision. The goal is to treat them like adults who are capable of hearing the reasoning behind it.
I would much rather have someone say, “I understand why you made that decision, but I still don’t agree with it,” than have them wondering what management isn’t telling them.
I think it is better for the truth to be out there when we can share it. Then we don’t have to hide. Employees know where they stand, managers don’t have to speak in riddles, and over time we have a better chance of building trust.
But there is a responsibility on the employee side too.
If you ask management to be more transparent with you, you also have to be willing to hear things you don’t like.