Your Open Door Policy (What Happened the Last Time?)
People don’t decide whether you have an open-door policy by reading the policy. They remember what happened the last time someone walked through the door.
I once worked in a leadership structure where my director was, appropriately, my first stop most of the time. That was great. He was my boss, of course, so I went through him. But every reporting structure eventually creates moments when the next level needs to be reachable. Maybe your boss is on vacation or doesn’t fully understand the issue.
And, occasionally, your boss may be the issue.
In every other organization where I had worked, I understood that going one level up was unusual but possible. Here, I understood almost immediately that the next level was not really accessible to me, despite the stated open-door policy.
Emails would often go unanswered (indefinitely). A request for a few minutes produced visible irritation. Access felt rationed closely enough that I became conscious of how much I was asking for each time I approached. I mostly stopped approaching and began believing that that was the point.
Even more revealing was what happened when something needed to move upward through my director.
“Well, I can take that to the CNO if you really want me to, but I can tell you it will not go well.”
Sometimes the issue needed to go even higher, and the warning remained much the same. He would explain that he had limited access himself, that she was extremely busy, that he could add the concern to his one-on-one the following week.
Then came the question, with enough hesitation built into it that the preferred answer was obvious:
“Do you really want me to bring it up?”
That creates a strange communication system. I am supposed to tell you what is happening. You are telling me that telling the person above you may create trouble. Now I have to decide whether the original problem is serious enough to risk creating a second problem for you.
Plenty of issues die right there.
And later, someone at the top wonders why nobody told them.
People Learn What Communication Costs
One of the best bosses I ever had communicated very differently.
He was busy, too. Sometimes I would send him several sentences explaining what was happening, what I had already done, and what he needed to know. His entire response might be:
👍
At first, this irritated me.
That was it? I had carefully explained all of that and received one thumb?
Then I learned what his thumbs-up actually meant.
I saw it. I understand. I trust you. Proceed.
And if the issue needed fifteen minutes, we spent fifteen minutes. If it required discussion, disagreement, context, or a decision, we had the conversation. He did not use brevity to avoid communication. He simply did not require ceremonial communication when that added nothing.
Over time, I found that wonderfully freeing.
If I was running down a hallway and needed something, I could be brief. No polished greeting or paragraph of political cushioning. No unnecessary “Hope you’re doing well” before telling him the roof was metaphorically on fire. If he was equally hurried, he could answer briefly too.
We had enough trust to communicate at the length the issue required.
That experience changed the way I think about accessibility. A leader can respond with one emoji and create more access than another leader creates with an open-door policy prominently displayed.
People do not require endless amounts of your time. They need to know that communicating with you is possible – that it is welcome.
Your Team Is Keeping a Record
Every time someone brings you something difficult, your response teaches them what to do next time.
They notice the sigh before you answer and the email that never gets answered at all.
They notice whether you keep typing while they speak.
They notice whether you become curious at uncomfortable information or immediately begin explaining why their concern cannot possibly be accurate.
They also watch what happens to other people.
Who gets labeled difficult or (Heaven forbid) gets talked about after the meeting?
Do some people lose access after raising a concern?
Or do they see that someone gets thanked for catching something early?
Who can disagree with you and still be treated normally the next day?
Teams learn these rules through observation.
Soon, employees begin making calculations that senior leaders may never know are happening:
Is this important enough to bring up?
Is it worth the reaction?
Can I solve it without involving her?
Do I really want my boss to get in trouble for carrying this upward?
By the time leaders think to ask, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” several people most definitely already know the answer.
Make It Easier for the Truth to Travel
If important problems often reach you late, look at the route the information had to take.
Maybe an employee told a charge nurse, who told a manager, who hesitated to tell a director, who decided to wait for the next scheduled meeting with an executive. At each level, someone interpreted the message, softened it, postponed it, or decided whether it was worth carrying any farther.
Sometimes the problem with communication is not that nobody spoke.
Everybody spoke, sometimes a lot.
They just kept speaking to people who could not solve it. Peers discussed it. Coworkers compared notes. Managers stressed over it together. Spouses heard the entire story over dinner.
The person with enough authority to change something remained blissfully uninformed.
That should concern us.
MAKE IT EASIER FOR THE TRUTH TO TRAVEL.
People can work with a busy leader, a brief leader, or one who occasionally says, “I cannot talk right now—give me until three.”
What they eventually stop doing is carrying hard information toward a leader who punishes them for bringing it.
You don’t need to be endlessly available. You do need reliable ways for important information to reach you. Your leaders need to know when escalation is appropriate. They need to be able to disagree, ask a question, report a problem, or say, “I think we may be missing something,” without first performing a political risk assessment.
And when you cannot respond immediately, acknowledgment matters.
Sometimes leadership really can look like:
· 👍
· Got it.
· I saw this.
· Call me at three.
· Tell me more.
· I disagree but keep going.
Those tiny responses tell people the road is still open.
What Happened Last Time?
Think about the last person who brought you something you did not want to hear.
What happened to them?
Think about the manager who interrupted you with a problem when your calendar was already impossible. What about the employee who challenged an assumption or the person who emailed twice because you hadn’t responded to the first one.
What did they learn about approaching you?
And what did everyone around them learn?
An open door is about patterns, about accumulated experience. Your people are building their expectations from dozens of ordinary encounters with you.
Make those encounters safe enough for you to hear the whole truth.
Don’t teach people that telling you early was a mistake.
If your leadership team needs help finding the communication patterns that keep important information trapped, softened, or delayed, Transformationship Leadership Group helps leaders strengthen trust, communication, accountability, and the systems that allow truth to move where it needs to go.
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