Once you are the person who decides pay, hours, promotions and who stays, every piece of news that travels towards you passes through somebody’s judgement about how you will take it.
Asking people to be more open does not fix it. You need a low-cost, low-risk, regular route for information to reach you, and a track record of what happens when it does.
Why does information get worse the more senior you get?
Someone on your team notices a problem. Raising it costs them a definite amount — the awkwardness, the time, the risk of being the one who always complains — against an uncertain benefit they may never see. And the person they would raise it with holds a great deal of influence over their working life.
That asymmetry exists in every business and is a structural feature of being the owner, so the fix is structural too.
Bad news also travels sideways faster than upwards. Four people can know about a problem, discuss it among themselves, and each believe someone else has told you.
What does the silence cost?
This sequence is illustrative, and the business is not a real one.
A 22-person firm turning over £1.8m has a fault in how new clients are handed from sales to delivery. The brief arrives incomplete, the first three weeks are messy, and the client forms a poor view early.
Two people notice it in February. One mentions it in passing at the end of a busy meeting; it does not land. The other assumes the first one has raised it properly. Nobody makes it anyone's job.
- March to July: three clients leave, each worth about £14,000 a year. That is £42,000 of recurring revenue gone.
- Replacing them: at a cost of acquiring a client of roughly £2,400 in marketing and sales time, another £7,200 to stand still.
- The owner's time: two of the three departures triggered several days of firefighting, apology calls and rework.
- Total, five months: about £49,200 — before anything is counted for the reputation or the effect on the team who watched it happen.
The fix, once it surfaced in August, took a fortnight: a written handover checklist and one named person accountable for it. It took six months because the information had no route to the person who could authorise the change.
What are the four filters?
Knowing which filter you are dealing with tells you what to do about it.
- The kindness filter. People soften bad news because they like you and know you are carrying a lot. It is the hardest one to spot because it comes from good people.
- The competence filter. Nobody wants to be the person who could not handle it. If admitting a problem looks like admitting a failure, people will try to fix it quietly first and tell you only once they cannot.
- The pointlessness filter. They raised something before and nothing changed. This is the one you control most directly, and the most damaging, because it is a rational conclusion from evidence.
- The proximity filter. You are not in the room. Information that would have reached you in a shared office when the business was six people does not reach you at twenty-two, because the corridor conversations you used to overhear now happen in rooms you are not in.
Three of those four have nothing to do with how approachable you are, so a lack of complaints does not mean a lack of problems. Leadership coaching spends a lot of time on this.
How do you ask so that you get an answer?
Use three rules.
Ask about a bounded period, not about feelings. “How are things?” is a social question and gets a social answer. “What slowed you down most last week?” is a factual question about a week somebody can remember, and it gets a fact.
Point the question at the process. “Where does the job get stuck?” is answerable without accusing a colleague. “Is anyone not pulling their weight?” is not.
Then stop talking. The useful answer often comes after a pause that feels too long to you. Our note on ask, don’t tell covers this habit.
Four questions to use:
- What slowed you down most last week?
- What do we do here that a customer would think was daft?
- If you had my job for a day, what would you change first?
- What have you stopped bothering to raise?
The answer to the last one shows where the pointlessness filter has taken hold.
Which routines keep information flowing?
A short weekly check with two or three people, on rotation. Put fifteen minutes in the diary with the same question set. By the fourth time somebody is asked what slowed them down, they have seen that the answer goes somewhere.
A standing item at the end of your team meeting. “What did we get wrong this month, and what did we learn?” — asked every time, answered by you first. When the owner names their own mistake first, admitting one becomes normal. Our guide to effective team meetings sets out where this fits in the meeting.
A quarterly conversation with someone who has no stake in your business. A peer, a non-executive or a coach is the only person in the process whose income, hours and standing do not depend on your reaction.
What should you do when you hear bad news?
How you respond the first time somebody brings you unwelcome news decides whether the next person brings you any.
- Thank them, specifically. Name what they told you and say it was useful.
- Ask questions, do not defend. Explanation can wait a day. Whatever you say in the first ten minutes is what gets repeated.
- Separate the news from the messenger. If the messenger is part of the problem, deal with that on a different day.
- Decide something, and say when. Even “I am not going to change that, and here is why” is a decision.
- Close the loop visibly. Go back a week later and say what happened.
Follow-through is where this often breaks down, so build it into a fixed rhythm. Our guide to building a high-performing team covers how.
What to do this week
- Pick three people who see the work at close range and put fifteen minutes with each in next week's diary.
- Ask one question: what slowed you down most last week? Then be quiet for longer than feels comfortable.
- Write down what you hear without responding to any of it in the moment.
- Choose one thing from the list, fix it inside two weeks, and tell the person who raised it that you did.
- At your next team meeting, name something you got wrong first.
- Book one conversation this quarter with somebody outside the business who has no reason to manage your feelings.
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Frequently asked questions
Why won't my team tell me when something is wrong?
Raising a problem costs certain effort and carries an uncertain reward, and the person they are raising it with decides their pay, their hours and their standing. That asymmetry exists even in a kind business. Silence is often a reasonable calculation made by someone who has watched what happened the last two times a problem was raised, and who has no way of knowing whether this time will go differently. Change what happens after the news, and the calculation changes with it.
Isn't an open door policy enough?
No. An open door puts the whole burden on the other person: they have to decide the problem is serious enough, choose a moment, walk in and raise it unprompted, all while guessing how you will react. Instead, go to them at a fixed time with a specific question, which takes about twenty minutes a week. Ask the same question each time, such as what slowed them down most last week, so people know what is coming and can prepare an answer. Keep a note of what you hear and what you did about it.
How do I ask a question that gets a useful answer?
Make it specific, make it recent, and make it easy to answer without criticising anybody. “Is everything all right?” gets you “yes” because it is a social question. “What slowed you down most last week?” gets you an answer because it is a factual one about a bounded period, and it points at a process rather than a person. Then stay quiet. The useful part of the answer often comes after the first pause, so do not fill it. Ask the same question for several weeks running.
What should I do the first time somebody tells me something I don't want to hear?
Thank them, ask questions, and do not defend anything in that conversation. Whatever you feel, the immediate response is being watched by everyone who hears about it afterwards, and it sets the price of the next piece of bad news. Take a note, agree what happens next and by when, and then close the loop visibly a week later so the person can see their report went somewhere. If you disagree with what you heard, say so on another day, after you have checked the facts.