Why “Assume Good Intent” Is Not Always Good Advice, Part 2: Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
— Louis Brandeis, Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
In a previous article, Why “Assume Good Intent” Is Not Always Good Advice, I discussed how far too often, I have had mentees and skip reports complain that their managers use “assume good intent” as a way to shut down the conversation or avoid dealing with the problem. This time, I want to share an approach¹ I have found to be effective when addressing situations in which someone is demonstrably operating with bad intent:
- Voice: Bring everything to light.
- Loyalty: Trust that the right outcome will happen in a healthy organization.
- (Optional) Exit: Evaluate alternative options.
Voice: Bring Everything to Light.
In 1913, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” when discussing the need for transparency in the government. Over a century later, transparency is still a core tenet of building a strong organization and is applicable not just to governments, but also to companies and teams. In a healthy organization, during a dispute, the best approach is to bring all information to light, such as sharing the full context of a situation, each person’s roles in it, and the various moves people have made. As you learn more about the situation, two possibilities may arise:
- You fell into the trap of Hanlon’s razor, in which you attributed to malice that is adequately explained by ignorance.
- You verify that the other party indeed does not have the best interests of the organization at heart.
Either way, bringing all data to light ensures that all parties, including decision-makers, are operating under the same set of information. With this approach, the only differentiating factor will be people’s opinions and the organizational culture.
Many years ago, I worked at a self-proclaimed “tech” startup. “Chad”², a lead project manager, would routinely go to the executives to complain that my team was behind on deliverables. Chad’s team and my team were working on a client project for which he was responsible for the business side, while my team built out the technical solutions for our client. One night, the CTO called me into his office:
CTO: “I keep hearing that your team is behind on deliverables.”
Me: “Uh, that’s not true. As shown in our Jira board, everything is on track, and we’ve hit all our dates so far.”
CTO: “But I keep hearing from Chad that the tech team is making slow progress.”
Me: “I don’t know why he would think that. Why don’t we create a spreadsheet to track all commitments from both the business and tech teams and review the progress with the executives weekly?”
CTO: “Sounds good. Let’s try it out.”
I collaborated with one of Chad’s team members to create a tracking doc for our joint project and set up a weekly executive review on our project’s progress, including both the business and engineering items. Incidentally, this inspired other engineering teams to do weekly reviews soon thereafter.
Loyalty: Trust That the Right Outcome Will Happen in a Healthy Organization.
I believe in defaulting to trusting an organization until proven otherwise. Starting out with distrust is generally unproductive: Not only will you not get what you need, you will likely tire yourself out by second-guessing every decision made by others. In the case at hand, while I had doubts regarding Chad’s good intent, I defaulted to assuming the good intent of the company’s executives, who I trusted to make the right decision once all the relevant data surfaced.
This was not without controversy. When I set up the weekly review meetings, multiple engineers argued:
Engineer 1: “Ken, why didn’t you push back harder? Chad is behind on all his deliverables and is clearly trying to divert attention away from his own failures. Why not call him out on it?”
Me: “You may very well be right, but there’s no point getting into a finger-pointing match. Let’s just present all the facts to leadership, and hopefully, the right outcome will happen.”
Engineer 2: “What if the right outcome doesn’t happen? [The CEO] clearly favors the business team over the engineering team.”
Me: “Let’s start by defaulting to trusting that the leadership will do the right thing. We’ll see how it goes after a few weeks.”
After a few rounds of the weekly status check-ins, it became evident that the engineering team was on track for all the deliverables, but the line items owned by the business team (e.g., getting client requirements, getting a preliminary agreement) were behind schedule.
Despite the obvious pattern, complaints from Chad about my team’s productivity didn’t stop. In fact, he started to escalate that he kept seeing my engineers on social media during work hours. Even worse, the VP of engineering did not shield our team from these distractions: At one point, he even went around me and instructed one of my engineering managers to “ask the engineering team to work harder.”
Feeling frustrated, I returned to the CTO:
Me: “Per the weekly reviews, my team has been on track for all of our deliverables. In fact, we are the only team in the entire company that has hit all of our timelines imposed by the business team. I don’t quite understand why we keep having conversations around engineers being on YouTube or Facebook during business hours.”
CTO: “I acknowledge that your team’s deliverables are on track, and I get where you’re coming from, but optics matter.”
While I gave my best shot at providing information and putting my faith in leadership, I realized that we fundamentally disagreed on operating principles. One of my core leadership values is: “Outcome over facetime.” Unfortunately, the CTO valued optics over progress.
(Optional) Exit: Evaluate Alternative Options.
Sunlight acts as the best disinfectant — in healthy organizations. Once you bring all relevant information to light, competent leaders typically make the right call to provide feedback to the bad actor or extract them from the situation. However, not all organizations are healthy and value transparency.
One sign of a decaying organization is when the folks in power feel a special bond with each other, so much so that it outweighs the needs of the organization. When there’s repeated data demonstrating that leadership will not make the right decision despite being provided with all the relevant information, it is time to consider our last option: exit.
In the case of Chad, in addition to productivity escalations, he would routinely make false statements or yell at our product manager when discussing his line items. For example, during one of the weekly executive check-ins, when we were discussing why the client agreement hadn’t been signed yet, Chad started diverting again:
Chad: “[The client] sent data over our test network, and it failed. I assumed the [engineering] team didn’t work on it over the weekend, so it’s still outstanding for their team.”
Me: “Actually, the client sent us three data streams. Two of them succeeded, and one failed. It was late Friday evening, so we told [the client’s IT department] that we would look at it this week. But weren’t we discussing signing the client agreement on our tracker?”
What was surprising to me at the time was that never once did executive leadership call out Chad’s behavior, such as deflecting observations on his lack of progress and lying or yelling at the product and engineering teams in meetings. After a few months, it became evident that the CEO liked Chad way too much to put a stop to this behavior. To add insult to injury, Chad eventually got promoted.
It was at that point that I realized that the organization’s cultural values were far too mismatched with mine and that there was nothing more I could have done. After reflecting on the past few months, I exited the company.
Now, I recognize that in the current economic environment and with layoffs happening across the industry, not everyone has the option to quit their job. If you do stay, not all hope is lost. As long as you keep behaving with integrity, you can identify other people who adhere to the same principles; when the time to exit eventually comes, you will have a network of people you trust who can connect you with future opportunities.
As mentioned in my previous article, my intent (no pun intended) is not to ask people to proactively assume bad intent. In fact, the mere act of “Voice: Bring everything to light’’ assumes good intent from organizational leadership. As an employee, I recommend writing down everything that happened and assessing the situation holistically. Bring that information to a trusted mentor to get a third party’s opinion. If you still believe there’s bad intent, take a leap of faith and share that information with everyone, including leadership. While the example above ended with me leaving the company, most successful organizations have some competent people in leadership who will make the right call to resolve your situation.
As a leader, you may not realize that you favor some people over others. Acknowledge those biases. Make sure that “assume good intent” does not get in the way of proactively addressing a bad situation. Do some self-reflection and be open-minded when feedback comes knocking. Some comments will be unfounded, and others will be valid. Collect information from all relevant parties and remind yourself of your biases before making a call on or addressing the issue.
Addendum
“Assume good intent” is also often used to shut down conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Oftentimes, bringing an issue to light as a minority reduces the chances of the situation getting resolved compared to cases in which an issue was raised by someone in a more privileged situation. In the examples above, the company was a white “boys’ club”: the CEO and Chad were both white, cisgender men who had originally aspired to work front-office jobs at top-tier investment banks. Their personal bond surpassed any professional data or context I or my team could have surfaced to change the situation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the following 15-month period, nearly all of the women and people of color on the cross-functional project team left the company, so that the remaining members consisted predominantly of white men. Further specifics would require a much longer discussion, but I wanted to point out that the success of this approach — given the current state of corporate America — could unfortunately be impacted by aspects of your identity that influence your degree of privilege (or lack thereof).
[1] This is a modified version of the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.
[2] Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
If you enjoyed this article, check out the other article/s in this series:
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
