Keeper of the Secrets

Kate Morton’s 2013 novel The Secret Keeper spends its pages “[s]hifting between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present[…]The Secret Keeper is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love.” Those are awesome things to have in a novel. They are horrible things to have in the workplace. If you want to avoid unnecessary challenges in your organization, try to avoid keeping secrets.

As a leader you need to be open about what you are doing. With few exceptions, the time for secrets is over. Forgot the passive aggressive manipulation, forget playing Jack off of Jill, forget your plans for total world domination…you have a business to run and all of that, ALL of it, simply slows down your progress. Leaders who play a game of “I have a secret” lead their people into trouble. Trying to do things in secret really explodes in your face once people find out what you are doing…and they will. Nothing stays a secret forever.

Why is openness so important for a leader? Well, first of all, you need to provide people a common focus. Your employees may go off in completely different directions without some common goals, so setting your goals and keeping them to yourself is not going to help. Your people probably don’t have mind-reading abilities, so if you want your them working together (and you DO), then they need to know the same information, and keeping plans and issues to yourself is not going to help.

While it is true that everybody likes surprises, it is also true that nobody likes surprises. While everyone (well, except for grumpy people) likes opening a present on their birthday, nobody likes opening a budget and seeing their resources got cut because of some priority they never heard of. People like to know what’s going on and if they feel they are being cut out of things they are going to resent it professionally and personally. A bunch of drama in the workplace does not help, and that is exactly what you get from talented employees who spend their time coming up with good ideas and hate seeing them wasted.

Yes, in many businesses you face inter-office politics, and that is usually the justification for a lack of transparency. But the impact that different groups in your organization will have on each other should lead to more transparency, not less. Chances are you need to get buy-in from other divisions to encourage cooperation and reduce friction in budget plans and such. Maybe your employees’ work is only going to matter if it is done together with others, and so you need cooperation rather than competition. Try to overcome the problem of politics rather than feeding it.

Having said all of this, there ARE some things you need to keep quiet. Personnel matters, for instance…not everyone needs to know who is making how much money or which employee has only 3 weeks to show some improvement before being let go (THAT employee needs to know, but you should not broadcast it to everyone). Private matters and problems at home should not be advertised…if you know one of your folks is having trouble at home and it is going to affect their work, find another way to explain that impact in the office without giving all the private details of your employee’s life. Remember, “transparency” is not the same as “feeding the gossip machine.”

If the reason you keep secrets in the office is because you don’t trust your employees — maybe you are concerned they will leave for a competitor, or perhaps use the information to take your job and get ahead — that is a sign of a bigger problem. Why do you have people working for you whom you do not trust? If you really and truly don’t trust your employees and peers, then the best thing to do is to go elsewhere, because this is a company destined for BIG problems.