It’s sprint review. A team “pulls out” work finished a couple of weeks ago, presented as fresh. Everyone in the room half-knows. That’s how teams deteriorate fast, and startups become political. Let’s create a healthier org.

Fake It Till You Break It

Startups run on promising things that don’t exist yet. CEOs sell features that aren’t even specced, and sales demos might be held up with duct tape. Externally, that’s arguably how things are done.

The problem starts when that behavior seeps into your culture. People watched it work externally and imported it into the building. When you start bluffing your own team, dishonesty becomes endemic and corrupts you all. That’s not how collaboration is supposed to take place. Your colleagues (or your CEO) aren’t your opponents!

What Internal Dishonesty Looks Like

Here are some examples I’ve seen at companies big and small. If you recognize your team in even one, you need to act fast.

• The example we started with, where the team hides finished work to release it at a politically convenient moment.
• Sugarcoating problems until they detonate. Rather than being honest about an issue that’s brewing, it’s minimized or hidden entirely until it’s too late (as always eventually happens).
• Padding estimates to be on the “safe side.” Safe from whom? You shouldn’t feel in danger internally. Sandbagged estimates corrupt price and the business’s “appetite” for the work.
• Hiding what the team is actually doing, fearing it looks like waste. If you can’t defend the work out loud, either the work or your fear is wrong. Worth contemplating which one it is.
• Agreeing in the meeting, knowing you won’t do it. It’s the cheapest and most corrosive lie. And think about the team leads around you listening to that lie. What mental note do you expect them to be making?
• The status-report fiction. You know the drill: people skewing OKR and KPI metrics towards the green for a project that’s entirely in the red.
  

Why This Kills The Org

First, when you do it internally, you’re teaching everyone else to do the same. Every hidden deliverable and padded estimate is a lesson to those watching. You’re telling them that’s how work gets done here. That’s training people to be dishonest.

But then this compounds. Buffers stack on top of buffers, where the engineer first pads something, the EM adds their own safety gap, and the VPE might be topping it with their own little buffer just in case. Three layers of 20% padding and voilà, nearly half your R&D capacity is spent on insurance against yourselves. And Parkinson’s law makes sure all that buffer will get eaten (and then some).

With time, this behavior converts teammates into counterparties. Everyone negotiating against everyone turns the behavior into striking internal deals, not collaborating and cooperating. A zero-sum game mentality that makes everything slower (and, frankly, not fun).

And on top of all of that, remember that you eventually get caught. And the trust hit doesn’t degrade linearly. One “white lie” can color differently everything you’ve ever said. CEOs can forgive slow, but can’t forgive not knowing about an issue in time.

An organization busy managing its own facade and keeping track of all the internal lies (or “buffers”) has no capacity left for the actual work.

Your Culpability

Most often, especially at startups, these lies cannot merely be explained by blaming people for being liars. They lie because honesty gets punished (or they believe it would). Perhaps someone got things done early and got slammed with too much work the next time. Or perhaps they tried to point out a risk and got labeled as being negative.

The uncomfortable question for you is about your part in the formation of this culture. When you hear unwelcome truths, what happens? Do you make future honesty easier or dangerous? Do you model dishonesty because you haven’t found the right way to communicate the truth?

Protocol

It’s time to turn things around and put an end to this organizational malady.

Kill the buffer stack: Estimates should be supplied raw, with risks stated clearly, in words. Padding, buffering, risk mitigation—whatever you call it—should happen at the right level, with full transparency, and based on business needs.

Reward the early bad news: Start treating things the right way and publicly. Thank those who unhide problems. As I’m working on sharpening my Italian here in Rome, I’ve learned the equivalent of “don’t shoot the messenger,” which is “ambasciator non porta pena.” The person blowing the whistle shouldn’t be punished. You want to put them on a pedestal.

Model the right behavior: Stop being afraid of your CEO. Don’t treat peers and colleagues as externals. Speak up. When you have bad news, deliver it yourself, early, in plain terms, and long before anyone has to dig for it. Your team leads calibrate their honesty to yours.

Make the work legible instead of hidden: If you’re afraid the business side will see what your engineers are doing, fix the work or fix the story. Don’t keep things hidden. You should learn how to communicate things in a manner understood by non-technical people and make the business case for your initiatives.

Taking It From Here

This week, you should start by modeling the right behavior to your people. Next spring review, make sure no one is presenting stale work as new. Ask them to stop buffering things but supply the context. To trust their colleagues. And you should do the same by talking openly about issues and what is going on as opposed to trying to pull a fast one on your cofounder.

You can run an honest and effective organization, or keep managing the facade. Each is a full-time job by itself. The choice is yours.