The idea of “shooting the messenger” was first expressed by Shakespeare, or so says Wikipedia. But in a nutshell, the leader who lashes out at the poor subordinate who got tagged to report bad news is wasting time, and wasting messengers. Don’t be that leader.

Many leaders say they want open communication in their workplace, but very often what they really want is open “top-down” communication. That is important; a leader needs to communicate a vision for the organization, provide clearly defined tasks, and offer constructive feedback even when it is not all happiness and sunshine. But “down-top” communication is equally important, just for different reasons. Your employees need to know they can come to you with bad news. If they don’t, and you never learn about problems, you will not be in a position to fix them until it is too late.

When your employees come to you with problems, especially if it seems to be their fault, your first instinct might be to blame someone. Try to restrain that urge; focus instead on fixing the immediate problem, and then the actual cause. In fact, you should look at having your employees fix it rather than taking on every problem yourself. If you try to handle everything, that just encourages your employees to dump everything on you.

This is not to say that you should not look into who is responsible for causing a mess. You need to, in order to help avoid future problems. Also, you might find a pattern of mistakes or neglect, which might mean that person has got to go. But looking for who is responsible should be one part of solving problems, not an end unto itself. Your first priority is to deal with whatever is wrong.

Now, once you appear open to receiving bad news and hearing about what is wrong, then you need to brace yourself to actually hear it. Employees may be very opinionated and not hold back. You are liable to get some very spirited discussions. Be clear about wanting them to feel comfortable coming to you with problems but also wanting them to do so professionally. Still, you need to have thick skin, and be able to respond logically and rationally rather than purely on emotion. While openness is essential, letting it devolve into arguing is going to create strained relations in the workplace, and you do not need that.

Realize that you may end up explaining some things that make you uncomfortable. A lot of people try to avoid “why?” questions by saying “because I’m the boss, that’s why,” but try to avoid that. You may feel you are not required to explain things to everybody, and that may be true, but you should at least be able to explain the reason behind decisions and policies. If you can’t, then maybe they’re bad.

Make sure your employees know they can bring you bad news and get the problem addressed. Do not have an attitude that encourages them to keep problems to themselves, or you will have people updating their CVs and calling recruiters because they know what is going on while you don’t. Keeping “who’s dating who” a secret is no big deal, but keeping “we are about to go bankrupt” a secret is.