When it snowed where I grew up, everything went white, and the white covered every ugly thing in sight. Broken walls, half-built houses, the rubbish nobody had cleared. All of it under one clean layer, and all of it exactly as it had been the day before.
The snow did not fix anything. It just made the ground look even.
I want to tell you about the version of that which happens inside a company, because I think it is the single most expensive thing I have seen at senior level.
Here it is in one line.
A calm company and a healthy company file exactly the same report.
Identical. Line for line. There is no box on any dashboard that separates a team with nothing wrong from a team where nobody has told you what is wrong.
The first is rare. The second is most Tuesdays.
How the quiet gets manufactured
The part that took me years to understand is that nobody in this is lying.
Somebody spots a problem on a Monday. It is real, but it is early, and they think they can sort it out before it matters. So they do not escalate. That is not covering anything up. That is initiative, and you would praise them for it.
Their manager hears a slightly gentler version, because the person telling them is already half way to fixing it. Gentler again at the next level, because that manager does not want to walk in with a half-solved problem and look like they cannot handle their own patch.
By the time it reaches the top it has passed through four people who each took about fifteen per cent of the worry out of it. Not one of them did anything wrong. Every single person behaved sensibly.
And the sum of all that sensible behaviour is a senior team looking at a smooth surface and calling it a good quarter.
And it gets worse the better you are
This is the bit I would not have believed at forty.
If you are known for seeing straight through things, people prepare more carefully before they bring you anything. They tidy it. Not falsify it. Tidy it.
So the sharper your judgement gets, the smoother your inputs become. You end up applying an excellent instrument to material that was groomed for it, and the whole system feels like it is working.
Your judgement is very good at reading a situation. It cannot read an absence at all.
And the expensive things in a big company are nearly always absences. The objection nobody raised. The customer who never complained and never renewed. The person who stopped saying the difficult thing in March, whose silence you have been reading as agreement ever since.
You cannot judge something that was never put in front of you. You can only go and look.
Going to look is slow, it produces nothing you can show anyone, it is impossible to justify on a calendar, and it is the first thing cut in a busy week.
Where I have landed
I do not have a system for this and I have never met anybody who does. The people who tell me they have solved it usually have an open-door policy and a great deal of confidence about what their company is really like.
What I will say is this. I trust a quiet quarter less than I used to. I trust an absence of bad news least of all.
One question
Do not answer it in general.
Think of the person reporting to you who has been easiest to manage this year. The one who never brings you a problem. Whose area you have not had to think about since roughly February.
When did you last hear anything difficult from them?
And if you cannot remember, is that because there has been nothing difficult, or because you have not been anywhere they could tell you?
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