The Cover-Up Culture

In high-performance management cultures it is very difficult to avoid developing a cover-up culture. I've seen companies avoid this either by (1) going out of their way to reward early disclosure of bad news, and severely punishing cover-ups, or (2) inculcating a scientific inquiry attitude throughout the organization, as if we are all scientists working in a lab where it is expected that our hypotheses will not always pan out, to the point where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity and those who do not fail every so often are thought of as not pushing themselves hard enough.

This wasn't a "cover up," but evidence that a culture that supported it existed: My boss on a prior job sent out a survey to get feedback on how he was doing. For some reason, logic escaped me and I provided honest feedback. So did the rest of the team. No one gave him a "failing" grade, but the marks weren't all "perfect" either.

He was presented the results by HR and just about flipped. If he had known who had said what, someone might have lost their job. Not having someone to single out, he just all berated us together - not the sort of boss behavior the survey was supposed create. From then on, I went back to my usual method of marking everything "perfect" and leaving no feedback text.

I still remember one of the VCs at my first startup telling us that the way we should think about potential board members is whether or not we'd be comfortable calling them at 2 a.m. to ask for help after a disaster had happened. The board and the executives can create a culture that either encourages or discourages honesty; and the rest of the company will model the founders' and executives' behavior.

I work for a government department that condones the "cover-up" culture. We maintain a website and monitor web analytics, yet we never report on areas where the site is doing poorly or could use some improvement. We report on the metrics that do not really measure ROI.

As a result, the website never improves or really evolves with the current trends in web development. It really makes me wonder about the usefulness of having a website if the cover-up culture is valued more than accurate reporting, even if that reporting isn't always the story that upper-management would like to hear.

Great piece that brings home just how important internal communication is for a startup. Bless those founders who know how to do it well and set up a culture from the get-go that encourages openness.

There are ways to avoid creating a cover-up culture. Avoid playing the blame game. Concentrate on solving problems rather than jockeying for advantage from problems. Concentrate on solving the root cause of problems rather than getting rid of symptoms of problems.

It's very, very easy to go down the wrong route on this, it's important to build up a strong culture of honesty and engineering integrity and that starts with people in leadership positions (which may not be people in the highest management positions).