Ensuring Bad News Gets Filtered to The Leader

How do you encourage people to filter bad news up to the top?

I’ve had environments. I remember a gentleman who was a round-the-world sailor, who was the first round the world sailor. An Englishman whose name is escaping me. I think Goff was his name, if I’m not mistaken. I remember him relaying a story to us in a forum that I was in. He was explaining how when he arrived to work on this round the world challenge with a new yacht they were building. That he’d looked at the project and said, “This doesn’t make any sense, it looks like we are way behind schedule, and it looks like we’re overspent. Every meeting I’m sat in, I get good news. It sounds like we’re doing great. I can’t really make sense of the two. My gut feeling is that we’re not where we should be.” His approach was, he introduced the bad news meeting. He actually had instigated a meeting where only bad news could be shared. Nobody was to bring anything positive about how they’re performing against KPIs. He only wanted to know what was not working and what was not going on well. It was his way of forcing the issue, really, of bringing it to the table and saying, bad news is just as important as good news. You can’t make a decision for the future if you don’t have a clear point of view on where the issues are. You can’t make better decisions. I’ve taken that to heart and on occasions when I really feel like we are not necessarily getting all of the story, I’m been happy to have the bad news sharing occasions, where it literally is a discussion around, I just want to know what’s not working. I’m not here on a witch hunt, I’m not here to take names. I’m here to understand why. Until I understand why, I can’t help you improve. I think that has to always be the message. Why would you bring bad news? Because I want to help you improve the situation. If that’s not the reasons to bring it, then it’s highly unlikely you won’t get the news.