It is important to get clear status updates on projects from your team. I have witnessed a pattern of communication breakdown when a team doesn’t share negative status up the organization. As the boss, the tendency to shy away from delivering bad news is common. Nobody wants to disappoint the boss. This tendency plays into the other common pattern of developer optimism where a feature can be 90% done for half the timeline.

I was responsible for a large rewrite project where our task was to replace a complicated monolith using a more modern architecture. I knew the risks to a rewrite of this size were large, and we were spending a lot to make it happen. Even though I felt I had a good relationship with my team, the team was only sharing positive metrics and not exposing some of the underlying trouble they were having in rewriting the monolith. We spent months making progress on paper only to find that the actual working software we had created was far from replacing the existing system. Once I realized the state of the project, it was too late to change course and get back on track.

You have a compound problem when your team has trouble delivering on-time and they also don’t tell you the real status of the work. These are two different problems. You can more effectively fix both when you realize they are different and consciously address them independently.

I recall a new product development project that was plagued with unexpected delays. I chose to have a regular weekly project status meeting in order keep close to the status. The project manager was not my direct report, and I could sense there was some hesitation to deliver bad news. I made it a regular habit to thank the project manager for providing the status as the headline statement in the meeting - such as “the current status is red due to the delay in standing up the staging environment.” The regular and direct positive reinforcement developed a strong relationship with the project manager and let her know I appreciated the status even when it was red. We leveraged our relationship to focus on clearing roadblocks.

You can become an effective problem solver with your team only when you know there is a problem. Your team needs to trust you enough to share their real status. It may take lots of positive reinforcement to overcome the natural fear of bearing bad news. I hear a concern from leaders I coach that giving positive feedback about negative status will “let the team off the hook.” Providing positive feedback to your staff when they share negative status is not the same as giving them a pass on the delay.

If you repeatedly “kill the messenger” when you get negative status from your team, they will stop giving you negative status. You won’t get the real story when the work is late or off-track. Ask yourself "do you want to know the status of your project?” Use positive feedback with your team to increase your likelihood of getting the real facts. Share this post using the links below, and contribute to the conversation with comments.