I remember working at an organization that essentially made the results of performance reviews open across the team. The rational was that it would help people make sense out of salary figures (which were also open). It did not improve team function and led to a lot of paranoia, fear, and resentment.
People keep secrets on some level because they need privacy. If a person is struggling, they often react by withdrawing and don't always appreciate their struggles being brought to attention. Especially when their livelihood is on the line. Everyone's different, but increased openness is not always going to help. Everyone should have the right to privacy in both personal and professional settings.
Update: Actually, I think the author of the article must understand all of this because they do call out privacy as necessary and try to distinguish it from what they're calling secrecy. And secrecy seems to basically mean willingly withholding information necessary to properly complete a job. They say this could happen if teams have an antagonistic working relationship. I think it's a useful distinction as I've also seen this happen at a company, more recently than the previous counter example that I gave.
> "...if teams have an antagonistic working relationship"
Yes of course a set of people constitute a team if and only if it meets the requirement for teamwork. That is, cooperate via info sharing, work load distribution and other support to get jobs done. Obviously merely assigning random workers to contiguous cubicles in no way constructs a team. That remains true even if a manager is loudly chanting holy corporate verse while pronouncing teamhood upon the hapless crew.
This is as it's always been, teamwork is essential for the survival of modern humans. Companies that foster teams, and teamwork among teams, are the ones likely to succeed in the marketplace.
I hear what you say, but I'd like to add that as an employee, I'd like the option to make my performance data, salary, etc public -- even if it that is not the organization-wide default.
The reactions that people have to their own data being public are partly a result of the current hidden-by-default model.
I'm not a great developer: I'm experienced, but I make the same mistakes that any junior would. I'd prefer to share the kind of feedback that I receive and how those discussions proceed, so that juniors can look ahead, learn, and avoid repeating the same mistakes (hopefully leading to a much more advanced cohort of future developers).
In a perfect world, I would agree. However, people are people and they often feel ashamed or embarrassed about not living up to expectations, whether those expectations are reasonable or not. Forcing someone to process those emotions publicly can be extremely humiliating and can seriously undermine trust building in a relationship.
I'm generally in favor of increased salary transparency since it will probably help to level the playing field. My point is that you have to draw the line somewhere.
Even making performance review details optional to disclose (as an official policy) might inadvertently create a culture where people look at you sideways as though you have something to hide if you appear as though you're not being forthcoming.
On the other hand, I don't think there's generally an expectation at most companies that you shouldn't discuss how things are going for you with your colleagues. That is, of course, as long as you don't seem to be doing an excessive amount of griping and finger pointing in the process.
> Forcing someone to process those emotions publicly can be extremely humiliating and can seriously undermine trust building in a relationship.
That's an important, accurate observation, thank you for voicing it - understood, I'll take that on board. Emotional support, companionship and other ways to indirectly process the situation (games?) seem like they could be helpful responses in that kind of situation?
> Even making performance review details optional to disclose (as an official policy) might inadvertently create a culture where people look at you sideways as though you have something to hide if you appear as though you're not being forthcoming.
That does sound very tricky to handle in a transparent environment too. I'm not sure whether I have great responses there other than to set a cultural expectation and understanding about the organization up-front (before applicants join).
To be honest, that makes me wonder whether a truly transparent organization should even offer the option for private feedback at all (note that that's a greenfield approach, as opposed to the question of how existing organizations could transition to a more transparent model).
It's literally the law in the US that you can always discuss your salary with your coworkers. Companies sometimes don't understand this, forbid it in writing, and get slapped down by the NLRB.
Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems.
I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us.
In order to make everyone's lives easier, I will sometimes work in secret on prototypes of more "controversial" ideas to bring before the team. I find starting the conversation with "Here's a new thing you can actually see and play with" eliminates 99% of the annoying bullshit you get out of non-technical folks.
It takes some discipline to do this correctly (i.e. don't ferret away on a secret prototype for more than ~1 week). That said, I can't imagine how you would scale an organization if everyone had to know everything always.
Also, none of this stuff is actually secret. It's more of a need-to-know basis. If someone explicitly asked me about one of these efforts, I would tell them everything they wanted to know and then some.
What you're talking about is sometimes referred to as "exercising covert agency" and IMHO it's absolutely essential for the well-being of creative folks in heavily project-managed corporate workplaces.
"Not keeping secrets" effectively ends up meaning that you need "permission" or at least consent for everything you work on. Depending on how tight things are this can be a recipe for misery because it's common in managerial ranks for people to be change-averse to the point of absurdity.
Google turns up nothing on that concept, but I agree that it is essential. You need a strong leader who can sense when stakeholders don't want to put up with that shit and when it's OK, and counterbalance that with how much of a dumpster fire the codebase is becoming.
You have to define who is in the team and who is not. Maybe Stakeholders are not. But inside the (cross-functional) team I would advise against "submarines" (german name for a secret project).
If the team can't handle this, the problem is somewhere else.
There's a difference between things that are secret because of people find out they will care, and things that are secret because people should not weigh in due to lack of knowledge or interest. I'm not sure how complex the system you are thinking of is, but in a system of even moderate complexity, the concept of team becomes abstract very quickly.
Completely agree with this. On numerous occasions I let an idea out while it wasn’t developed enough to go in the right direction on its own. It turned into a shit show.
Many many ideas I write down and develop. Many I throw away. But I learned never to throw information on the table without analysing the consequences of doing so.
I feel like that doesn’t quite count as a secret, if the aim is explicitly to show people a fully expressed idea as opposed to something theoretical/conceptual.
> Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire […]
I think your urge to hide things until ready is clearly a symptom of other (root) problems within the organization. I have never seen what you describe in a healthy organization, and many seemingly “healthy” places are not. It sounds like the organization fears failure and refuses to learn from mistakes or believes it’s impossible. This is a cultural issue that needs to be fixed by senior leadership but, if I had to guess, is probably caused by senior leadership being unwilling to trust.
I’d encourage you to look to solving roots and not symptoms or go somewhere else where you’re allowed to. Good luck.
It's easy to not have seen things in healthy workplaces if you don't have a lot of experience. This is why we have implicit bias against folks who look really young, fair or not.
I honestly do not know how that was your take away from what I wrote. Can you please elaborate on how what you quoted at all implies:
1.) I’ve never screwed up.
2.) (and never) Had to do something different.
I’m saying the lack of transparency you’ve been forced into to accomplish things is the result of people who are incapable accepting mistakes or doing things differently. You must work in secret because people don’t believe the technical team can or will learn from their mistakes. In a healthy organization you would not have this burden.
This is a simplistic take. Of course trust is a pre-requisite to a healthy team, and people should feel comfortable speaking out, there's no debate about that. However, transparency is not a silver bullet. I've seen plenty of teams that trust each other but don't get very much done. And if what you are doing is large and involves more than a two-pizza team or challenging tradeoffs then effective communication becomes much harder. If everyone just speaks their unfiltered thoughts without thinking about how those words will be perceived there is a high likelihood of confusion and churn. There is also the matter of expertise, and the fact that many important truths may not be grokked by all stakeholders, so just blurting them out may lead to furrowed brows and unproductive lines of questioning—or worse—a bad decision fueled by misunderstanding.
This makes sense, and it helps a lot when conversation is focused and concise (while also allowing for a small amount of redundancy: people may acknowledge and display their receipt of previous messages by repeating them in their own words).
When you mentioned communication becoming harder: were you referring to audio/video discussions (in-person or otherwise) and/or also text-based messaging?
That isn't a claim. The claim is that a team with full transparency is more effective (in terms of work done) than one with a limited transparency.
What's interesting is there's talk about one-on-ones like they are an acknowledged best practice, but nothing about established payscales (or open salaries).
> Of course trust is a pre-requisite to a healthy team
it is hard to rust someone on the team with technical tasks when that person is not technically capable for a developer.
Third reason is that since information is distracting. Say there is a 30% chance of layoffs in the next quarter. Should this be communicated down the chain when it's not actionable and will do nothing but probably effectuate itself?
Secrecy is an important part of running any organization.
I worked for a company that was seriously tinfoil. I thought, over the top, but they had certain policies, and I abided by them; whether or not I agreed with them.
We had a public channel for our team and invited people to join it to watch our work. And then we got a private channel as well... and all our work and conversations moved to the private channel. Now the public channel is crickets and the other teams don't know what we're doing. I can actually feel a sort of tension now, like the outside teams don't feel as connected to us. They don't have the opportunity to ask questions about what we're working on, see what our other tasks are, or start discussions on related subjects. It sucks. I don't want privacy or secrecy, I want us to all feel we can talk about anything together.
Unfortunately the effectiveness of a team doesn't necessarily support the individuals within it. If a worker feels expendable, which they typically are, they may keep "secrets" regarding the functioning of certain aspects of a process or maintain the exclusivity of some relevant relationship to make the team more dependent on them. A team needs to support the necessary incentives for the members of that team to feel the team's success translates to their own personal success.
While I agree in principle, the main issue I've seen many times is this usually rolls down to apply to engineering only. "Oh you devs can't fix that bug or refactor that without talking to 'the team'". "Why is that architect suggesting and interfering with 'the team'"? etc, but then UX and product have their own planning, initiatives, roadmaps, etc that are totally off the books and never discussed by this so called team.
> If I don’t believe that other members of my culture have my best interests at heart, I may decide to keep as many secrets as possible to prevent information from being leveraged against me.
The biggest challenge for me here is that I don’t believe a team or company can have my best interest at heart, as they often conflict with the best interests of the company.
In practice, the company is not an entity able to set objectives or make decisions, decisions are made and influenced by individuals, and often the incentives of individuals are _not_ aligned with maximising stockholder profits. In many cases companies do things that do not maximize stockholder profits. There are blatant examples of this where a company CEO or company president is able to plunder assets from the company for their own personal enrichment (e.g. through self-dealing where the company buys or sells assets to another entity controlled by the CEO). There are also many cases where a project pursued by the company may have zero or negative benefit to the firm and to its shareholders, but provide many benefits to the employees leading or participating in the project.
William J. Bernstein's article Of Earnings, Dividends, and Agency [1] offers an educational and entertaining perspective on this:
> in a taxless world a company’s dividend policy should matter not at all to the shareholder. Inside academia, this is known as the "Modigliani-Miller theorem." In the taxable world, of course, shareholders prefer capital gains to dividends. So why do companies pay them?
> Because, to put it bluntly, corporate officers are often scoundrels and theives. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They invest in projects more on the basis of turf, prestige, and politics than cash flow. They run around in Learjets and eat fois gras on your nickel. Shareholders intuitively know this and insist on spiriting their cash away from these bad actors as fast as they can.
....
> "failure to disgorge cash leads to its diversion or waste, which is detrimental to outside shareholders’ interest."
....
> But what is most remarkable about [the paper by La Porter, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, Vishny][2] is its tone, which is almost Menckenesque in its description of modern corporate ethics. They describe a Hobbesian world in the kind of plain English rarely seen in academic finance; "Firms appear to pay out cash to investors because the opportunity to steal or misinvest it are in part limited by law, and because minority shareholders have enough power to extract it."
If Bernstein were to update his 2000 article for 2022, he might need to briefly discuss share buybacks as an increasingly popular tax efficient alternative to dividends. Share buybacks, like dividends, allow cash to be extracted from company coffers and captured as gains for shareholders.
Privacy over secrecy is an alright goal, but the rest of it sounds like consultant double-talk.
In theory, "eliminating secrets" means the manager listening to the report's reservations and addressing them effectively. In practice, it means rooting out dissent and silencing opposition. The manager has created an environment where their reports don't feel safe talking to them. Instead of asking hard questions like "how the hell did I, the manager, screw up so badly", the article suggests easy answers like Project Retros or 1:1s.
The article is further undermined by author's inexperience in product management. Brand building as an "expert" with only a few years in industry is a red flag.
> Both backchanneling and micromanaging are easy to identify. When there are different answers to the same question, that’s the result of backchanneling. When you see clones instead of people, it’s a sign of micromanagement. The good news is that once you see these trends emerging in your team, there are some concrete steps you can take to roll them back.
First of all, there are plenty reasons to have a private conversation, and backchanneling is not a priori a bad thing. And the part about micromanagement leading to people "being clones" is gobbledygook—what does that even mean? And then the suggestion that those things are magically fixed just by the most basic entry level management practice of 1:1s and retros.
Frankly, it feels as though the author has tried to generalize some personal experience and completely lost the script. In reality, management is very hard and very contextual. For any given action there is a time and a place. Specifics matter.
The opposite of secrecy is not transparency, but safely trusting.
That is, some things are hidden, but not actively so. I don't need to know how hard my peers are working. Or what they are thinking. Or if they think the project will succeed. Or when they work, for that matter.
I trust that if they need or want help, they can ask. I also trust that if I offer help, it is in good faith and it can be turned down. I could be wrong that they need or want any help.
Not all interactions have to be interventions.
This is not that some things don't belong at work. It all depends on the trust in the group. I agree that more trust is generally better. But sometimes that is fostered by not forcing a spot light on everyone.
Reminded of a discussion where I had to call out that the company culture of "transparency" was really only openness - everyone was willing to offer valuable help and information, but nobody was willing to publish it, even internally. During a rash of clumsily handled (and opaque) M&As that were making people feel redundant and competing for roles they already held, it became useful to act oppositionally against co-workers, especially new ones being hired in the middle of this infighting. The lack of deeply rooted internal transparency made this possible.
Everyone trusted each other _individually_ and could easily ask questions that they knew to ask, when they already knew who to ask. But to understand the shape of the company, or even who the internal stakeholders were in projects, or access to basics like repositories and documents, people faced a lack of trust coming from the organization itself.
This kind of totally open, real-time flow of information is great until it's not. It can easily turn into an unstructured free-for-all on whichever channel everyone is on as a substitute for more effective communication, decision-making and documentation. It can also easily become a vehicle for one or more lurking manager types who simply have to know everything all the time, whether or not that brings any actual benefit to the team. Both of these scenarios tend to be toxic to productivity and eventually team morale. Unfortunately with the recent emphasis on remote working that a lot of organisations weren't used to and everyone adopting Teams/Slack/whatever both of these scenarios also seem to happen quite often.
> It can also easily become a vehicle for one or more lurking manager types who simply have to know everything all the time, whether or not that brings any actual benefit to the team.
Given that type of character within the working environment, I'd personally prefer that their communications were largely on-display to all the teams around them.
Them knowing everything that is going on doesn't necessarily seem a problem in itself, but if they're using that to cause disruption or selectively push different parts of the organization in different directions, then -- unless there is some broader plan that they could share -- it seems like the teams could more easily encourage the person onto a healthier path by having visibility into those patterns.
Given that type of character within the working environment, I'd personally prefer that their communications were largely on-display to all the teams around them.
But their communications are often the last things to be shared, except when they are insisting that everyone else share everything. IME this is a bad idea for much the same reasons you don't want managers in code reviews. You don't promote honest feedback and constructive criticism when those giving and receiving the comments feel like management are snooping on everything all the time.
Them knowing everything that is going on doesn't necessarily seem a problem in itself, but if they're using that to cause disruption
Bingo. It's the disruption that causes the problem. But both micromanagement and chilling effects can be extremely disruptive.
> But both micromanagement and chilling effects can be extremely disruptive.
Completely agree.
> You don't promote honest feedback and constructive criticism when those giving and receiving the comments feel like management are snooping on everything all the time.
Also true.
But management couldn't do much to coerce people -- including plausibly-deniably intimidating, harassing and spooking staff -- even if they're watching everything they do -- without themselves entering into some risk.
Add to that the fact that any kind of sophisticated employee-trolling would require co-ordination and research, and transparency becomes more and more attractive, as long as it's applied in both directions.
(I'll add that part of the working theory here is that rank-and-file staff (non-management) are on equal footing; not always necessarily true, perhaps, but should be on aggregate for large enough populations)
The only effective method to stop secrecy is vulgarization and evangelization, otherwise nobody's gonna trust that what you do or how you work is the proper way.
> The cross-functional team confirms the plan for tackling their goals in the next quarter.
Your organization does not equally reward teams that do this in a transparent manner because it has a bias towards new and shiny projects. Teams that work on shiny new projects get way more leeway to propose unrealistic goals without actually achieving them.
> They then set up a meeting cadence to check in, and they make clear communication rules in a public channel so the rest of the team can keep up with each other when there are questions. Backchanneling is nonexistent, and there aren’t many questions because micromanagement is at a minimum.
Your organization does not equally reward teams that do this in a transparent manner because there is not enough cracking down on people that behave like assholes in public channels in the name of transparency. Team X's manager can be an asshole in Team Y's public channel, but Team Y's manager behaves quite nicely in Team X's public channel. Ironically, since you didn't fire Team X's manager, the organizational perception becomes that Team Y is the one with problems, since "there's always someone complaining about them".
> The group identifies problems as they come up, brings them to the attention of everyone on the team and discusses them publicly.
Your organization does not equally reward teams that do this in a transparent manner because teams that work on moonshots that fail miserably never have their problems discussed; but teams that do slow and steady work are often micromanaged to death about some 5% productivity drop this week.
See any commonalities here? Even if each team is managed perfectly by itself, organization-wide disparities can lead to these undesirable patterns appearing anyway. Your organizational leaders and management as a team need to work together to make things more equitable, and fight the natural emergence of these patterns.
My last job, everything was a secret. Documentation was in people's minds. I was practically the only person who ever wrote public documentation for the team. Most people kept personal passworded one notes where they kept their own documentation.
Lets not even talk about beyond the necessities for a team. Salary? Oh boy was that ever secret. The one guy had an instant where he was oncall, major outage in the middle of the night and he didnt wake up to answer the alarms. Big client billionaire ceo demanded the guy be fired. Boss went around tell everyone that we were going to pretend he was fired, but he wasnt fired.
So naturally when this guy gets a new job, he tells everyone how much $ and benefits he's getting at the new job. He even tells people how much he used to be paid. People were freaking out. Minimu wage was $14 at the time and some senior sysadmins were only getting $22. LOL so many quit within a month or so.
People keep secrets on some level because they need privacy. If a person is struggling, they often react by withdrawing and don't always appreciate their struggles being brought to attention. Especially when their livelihood is on the line. Everyone's different, but increased openness is not always going to help. Everyone should have the right to privacy in both personal and professional settings.
Update: Actually, I think the author of the article must understand all of this because they do call out privacy as necessary and try to distinguish it from what they're calling secrecy. And secrecy seems to basically mean willingly withholding information necessary to properly complete a job. They say this could happen if teams have an antagonistic working relationship. I think it's a useful distinction as I've also seen this happen at a company, more recently than the previous counter example that I gave.