<story><title>Effective teams don’t keep secrets</title><url>https://www.theadamthomas.com/effective-teams-dont-keep-secrets/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davesque</author><text>I remember working at an organization that essentially made the results of performance reviews open across the team. The rational was that it would help people make sense out of salary figures (which were also open). It did not improve team function and led to a lot of paranoia, fear, and resentment.&lt;p&gt;People keep secrets on some level because they need privacy. If a person is struggling, they often react by withdrawing and don&amp;#x27;t always appreciate their struggles being brought to attention. Especially when their livelihood is on the line. Everyone&amp;#x27;s different, but increased openness is not always going to help. Everyone should have the right to privacy in both personal and professional settings.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Update:&lt;/i&gt; Actually, I think the author of the article must understand all of this because they do call out privacy as necessary and try to distinguish it from what they&amp;#x27;re calling secrecy. And secrecy seems to basically mean willingly withholding information necessary to properly complete a job. They say this could happen if teams have an antagonistic working relationship. I think it&amp;#x27;s a useful distinction as I&amp;#x27;ve also seen this happen at a company, more recently than the previous counter example that I gave.</text></comment>
<story><title>Effective teams don’t keep secrets</title><url>https://www.theadamthomas.com/effective-teams-dont-keep-secrets/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bob1029</author><text>Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems.&lt;p&gt;I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like &amp;quot;refactor&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;iterate&amp;quot;. Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us.&lt;p&gt;In order to make everyone&amp;#x27;s lives easier, I will sometimes work in secret on prototypes of more &amp;quot;controversial&amp;quot; ideas to bring before the team. I find starting the conversation with &amp;quot;Here&amp;#x27;s a new thing you can actually see and play with&amp;quot; eliminates 99% of the annoying bullshit you get out of non-technical folks.&lt;p&gt;It takes some discipline to do this correctly (i.e. don&amp;#x27;t ferret away on a secret prototype for more than ~1 week). That said, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine how you would scale an organization if everyone had to know everything always.&lt;p&gt;Also, none of this stuff is actually secret. It&amp;#x27;s more of a need-to-know basis. If someone explicitly asked me about one of these efforts, I would tell them everything they wanted to know and then some.</text></comment>