

The Cover-Up Culture - ojbyrne
http://steveblank.com/2011/01/10/the-cover-up-culture/

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Umalu
In high-performance management cultures it is very difficult to avoid
developing a cover-up culture. I've seen companies avoid this either by (1)
going out of their way to reward early disclosure of bad news, and severely
punishing cover-ups, or (2) inculcating a scientific inquiry attitude
throughout the organization, as if we are all scientists working in a lab
where it is expected that our hypotheses will not always pan out, to the point
where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity and those who do not fail
every so often are thought of as not pushing themselves hard enough.

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dabent
This wasn't a "cover up," but evidence that a culture that supported it
existed: My boss on a prior job sent out a survey to get feedback on how he
was doing. For some reason, logic escaped me and I provided honest feedback.
So did the rest of the team. No one gave him a "failing" grade, but the marks
weren't all "perfect" either.

He was presented the results by HR and just about flipped. If he had known who
had said what, someone might have lost their job. Not having someone to single
out, he just all berated us together - not the sort of boss behavior the
survey was supposed create. From then on, I went back to my usual method of
marking everything "perfect" and leaving no feedback text.

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zipdog
I think it's possible to reach this situation without a cover-up culture.

Survey feedback can easily drift upwards: as a few people start scoring
'great' more often than necessary, everyone else needs to start scoring
average workers as great to ensure they aren't left behind. Eventually
anything less than perfection indicates total failure.

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gaius
Oh yeah, HR is ridiculous. For example at my company, if your appraisal says
you "meet expectations" that's not good enough; you are expected to exceed
expectations. The paradox of this obviously eludes whoever is responsible for
it.

At appraisal time, you pick 3 cow-orkers to give you "feedback". Everyone
stitches this up with their mates; if you tried to be honest - because no-
one's perfect - you'd effectively be punished by having the lowest score of
your peers!

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jdp23
I still remember one of the VCs at my first startup telling us that the way we
should think about potential board members is whether or not we'd be
comfortable calling them at 2 a.m. to ask for help after a disaster had
happened. The board and the executives can create a culture that either
encourages or discourages honesty; and the rest of the company will model the
founders' and executives' behavior.

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hashbrown7
I work for a government department that condones the "cover-up" culture. We
maintain a website and monitor web analytics, yet we never report on areas
where the site is doing poorly or could use some improvement. We report on the
metrics that do not really measure ROI.

As a result, the website never improves or really evolves with the current
trends in web development. It really makes me wonder about the usefulness of
having a website if the cover-up culture is valued more than accurate
reporting, even if that reporting isn't always the story that upper-management
would like to hear.

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kirinkalia
Great piece that brings home just how important internal communication is for
a startup. Bless those founders who know how to do it well _and_ set up a
culture from the get-go that encourages openness.

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InclinedPlane
There are ways to avoid creating a cover-up culture. Avoid playing the blame
game. Concentrate on solving problems rather than jockeying for advantage from
problems. Concentrate on solving the root cause of problems rather than
getting rid of symptoms of problems.

It's very, very easy to go down the wrong route on this, it's important to
build up a strong culture of honesty and engineering integrity and that starts
with people in leadership positions (which may not be people in the highest
management positions).

