Why are we still lying to employees and treating them like children?

The biggest mistake leaders make today is underestimating the people they’re talking to. “It’s not the right time to tell them yet.” “They don’t need all the details, we’ll just be walking into a trap.” “Better to wait until we have the full answer.” If you’ve ever heard or said any of these, know that this is your real problem: the assumption that people can’t understand the reality they work in every single day.

Employees aren’t children who need their information carefully rationed. They’re adults who make decisions every day that directly affect your business, and they know perfectly well when something isn’t right. They notice changes in behavior, who’s no longer in the meetings, which projects have stalled, what the tone of communication is.

So yes, you can delay communicating, you can wait for “the right moment,” you can choose your words carefully, but you can’t stop people from reading the signals they get every day. The paradox is that companies often try to “protect” employees from uncertainty, and it’s precisely that lack of openness and communication that creates even more uncertainty.

When a company doesn’t tell its story, employees will write it themselves: in hallway chats, over lunch, in WhatsApp messages, with assumptions and worst-case scenarios. Not because employees are negative, but because the human brain is wired to look for an explanation when there isn’t one. Please underline this. Or make it your screensaver.

I’ve worked with plenty of companies that had excellent strategies and plans but a big trust problem on the inside. People didn’t understand what was happening or why, so they didn’t feel secure. When information comes late, selectively or without context, employees very quickly get the sense that something is being hidden from them, and trust starts to wear thin.

Of course, companies and leaders can’t, and shouldn’t, share every piece of information with their people at every moment. Some business decisions require confidentiality, preparation and the right timing. But there’s a huge difference between responsible communication and staying silent out of fear that employees will throw a tantrum.

You don’t need to protect adults from the truth. You need to give them enough context to understand it. And yes, maybe someone won’t like the decision, maybe they’ll ask uncomfortable questions, push back, or even get frustrated. But people accept tough decisions far more easily when they understand the logic behind them, and that temporary dissatisfaction is a much smaller problem than the long-term distrust that sets in when people feel they’re being played.

Culture isn’t built through values painted on the walls or an Easter egg decorating workshop. It’s built in the moments when a company chooses whether to talk to people as partners, or as an audience to be served a carefully packaged narrative.

Leaders don’t always have to have all the answers, but they do need to have the courage to start the conversation and lead it. You can’t protect your employees from what they already see, but you can choose whether to give them the context to understand it, or leave them to fill in the blanks themselves.