The elephant in the room: A manager’s guide to transparency under constraints

Hoping your team hasn’t noticed the elephant in the room?

Too late, they have.

This is a common issue in workplaces, where managers avoid addressing a situation directly and in doing so leave an abundance of space for people to make up their own stories.

This kills trust, which is bad for productivity and wellbeing.

Here’s an example: imagine one of your teammates turns up to work one morning and gets called into a hushed meeting with your boss before leaving suddenly and not coming back for weeks. And your boss says nothing.

Your boss is probably hoping you won’t notice – or that you at least won’t think too much about it and just carry on as usual. And they’ll be praying that – whatever you do – you don’t ask them any direct questions about it!

But of course you would notice. And you’d also notice that they’re not saying anything about it.

And this vacuum of information becomes a blank canvas onto which we can project our most vivid fears. We naturally start to wonder if we’ll be next. And have a panic attack each time the boss asks to speak to us.

This is a huge problem for the manager. Because trust moves at the speed of truth.

So situations like this quickly erode trust, which can be painstakingly slow to rebuild.

Instead, as managers – we must always default to transparency. Transparency about the situation itself or, when we can’t share the facts, transparency about the process and when we will be able to share what’s going on.

Because, even when we can’t share the details, we can still:

• Acknowledge that there is indeed an elephant in the room
• Explain why we can’t tell people the specifics of what’s going on
• Let people ask questions about the situation, even if we’re unable to answer them all
• Let people know when we expect to tell them what’s happening
• Provide regular updates – even if just to say “I know it’s been a while and I’m sorry, but I’m still not able to share anything”

This will help maintain – if not build – trust in our team. And that will serve them, us and the team as a whole well over the long term.

Sitting on something you can’t tell your team?

Knowing you should acknowledge it is easy. But it can be hard to find the wording: how to name the thing without saying more than you’re allowed to, what to do when someone asks the question you can’t answer and how to promise an update you can stick to. Coaching gives you an hour by video with someone who’s run teams and organisations, to work out what you’ll say and when you’ll come back to them. Your first session is free. You walk into that meeting knowing your team will come out of it still trusting you.