Every engineering org I've worked with had a culture deck. Values on the wall. A nice office. Free snacks, team offsites, a budget for conference tickets.
None of it told you what the culture was.
Here's the test I use now. An engineer on your team finds a problem on Tuesday morning. Something big. The migration won't make the date, or the new payments service drops one transaction in a thousand. How long until the person who controls the budget and the deadline knows about it? And when it arrives, does it still look like a problem?
Dan Greene put it in one line: culture isn't perks, it's how truth travels. I think he's right, and I think most of us have never measured it.
Bad news changes color on the way up
Project folk have a name for this. The watermelon project. Green on the outside, red on the inside. The status report says green for months, then flips to red the week before launch, and everyone acts surprised.
Nobody lies on purpose. Each layer softens the message a little. The engineer says "we're in trouble." The team lead writes "some risk to the date." The manager reports "on track, monitoring a dependency." By the time it reaches the exec dashboard, the red has gone.
Researchers have studied this for decades. They call it the mum effect... a project member's reluctance to report bad news about a troubled project. A 2008 study in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems describes it as "an important contributor to project failure." The same study found time pressure and questions of blame both shift whether someone speaks up. Ship-it-now pressure and a hunt for whose fault it is. Sound familiar?
Fourteen studies, five uncomfortable findings
Mark Keil, Jeff Smith, Charalambos Iacovou and Ronald Thompson spent years on this problem. Between them they ran 14 academic studies on how people report, and misreport, the status of IT projects. Their MIT Sloan Management Review piece boils it down to five "inconvenient truths." Here are the ones every engineering leader should tape to their monitor:
- You won't get accurate status from your staff by default. People put a positive spin on anything heading to senior management, and a climate hostile to bad news makes it worse.
- Auditors won't fix it. Bring in a team to police the reports, and people open up less, not more.
- Putting a senior exec in charge makes misreporting worse. The bigger the name on the project, the harder it gets to say it's failing.
- Executives often ignore bad news when they do get it. The researchers found cases where people took their concerns straight to the decision makers and still got nowhere.
Read the last one twice. The problem isn't only people hiding things. Sometimes the truth arrives and the boss refuses to hear it.
The boss sets the color of the report
Here's the part I find hardest to swallow as a leader.
A study of 561 project managers in MIS Quarterly looked at what drives selective reporting. The answer wasn't the project manager's ethics. The three factors with a direct effect were all about the relationship with the executive:
- The executive's power
- How much the project manager trusted the executive
- The quality of the executive's own communication
The same study found optimistic biasing degrades reporting quality, and reporting quality drives project performance.
So when your reports come back green and the project lands red, look in the mirror first. You set the color of the report. Your team reads your face, your tone in the last review, and what happened to the last person who brought you a problem. Then they decide how much truth you get.
This is why I keep coming back to the number from my own research at Step It Up HR: 99.5% of the people we surveyed said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. Most of those bosses never knew. Nobody told them, because nobody felt safe enough to try.
When the truth stops on the wrong floor
The worst version of this story is Columbia.
In January 2003, foam struck the shuttle's left wing during launch. Engineers at NASA Langley and Johnson worried about the damage and ran the analysis in case of the worst. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board wrote: "their concerns never reached the managers on the Mission Management Team." Those were the people with operational control over the shuttle.
The board concluded NASA's culture and management failures "had as much to do with this accident as the foam." Low-level engineers raised concerns and often got no feedback from the senior managers they contacted. The board chair, Admiral Hal Gehman, said leaders at every level would have to look for traits "such as stifling communication and stomping on engineers" and drive them out.
Your outage won't kill seven people. The mechanism is the same, though. Somebody knew. The knowledge stopped on the wrong floor.
How to make truth travel faster
You won't fix this with a new dashboard. You fix it with behavior, and the behavior has to start with you.
Reward the first messenger, loudly
The first person to raise a problem takes the biggest risk. Thank them in public. Make the story about how early they spotted it, not about whose fault it was. Your team watches what happens to messengers far more closely than they read your values poster.
Ask for the red
Stop asking "are we on track?" It invites a yes. Ask "what's the thing most likely to make us miss?" or "what are you worried about you haven't told me?" I wrote more on this in Your Team Knows What's Broken.
Go to the floor where the work happens
The Sloan authors recommend getting views from people at different levels of the project, not only the person writing the report. Sit in on a standup. Read a pull request thread. Talk to the engineer, not the summary of the engineer.
Watch your face when the news is bad
Your first reaction teaches everyone in the room. Sigh, interrupt, or start hunting for blame, and the next report gets a shade greener. Ask a question instead. "What do you need?" works well.
Track the lag
Pick a few recent incidents or slipped dates. When did someone on the team first know? When did you know? The gap between those two dates is the most honest culture metric you own. Hours? Good. Weeks? Your perks budget is buying you nothing.
What your culture costs you
I noticed a thread trending on Reddit this week about a screenshot of a sick-leave refusal. "Sorry, you are out of sick days." "You are out of employees." One commenter made the sharper point. Hiring freezes left the team too thin to absorb anyone being ill, and the sick-day policy was a symptom. Someone in the building knew the staffing was too thin. I'd bet the message turned green somewhere on the way up.
Perks are easy to buy. Truth travel takes years to build and one bad meeting to wreck.
So here's my question for you. When was the last time someone brought you bad news early... and what did your face do?