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“I’m too busy. I’m overloaded. I can’t take on more. I do all this budgeting work, but I never know how things turn out,” Tara, our financial planning and analysis manager, said gently, not quite a complaint, but not quite a mere observation either.
I ignored the first few comments and homed in on the last one.
She’d done two years of budgets but never got to see the actuals. Without feedback she was flying blind and I was the one keeping her there. It made me wonder: What was I doing, repeatedly, that I couldn’t even see?
It reminded me of something former NBA player Iman Shumpert once said about guarding Kobe Bryant.
Kobe had a pattern: three hard dribbles, then the cross. Shumpert figured it out and started counting it out loud: Three, two, stab. He had him.
But Kobe realized Shumpert was counting his dribbles. Kobe adjusted. Shumpert’s edge was gone.
In my own companies, I was Kobe, playing hero ball. Only I didn’t realize I was dribbling and playing against my team instead of with them. Kobe changed his pattern to stay ahead.
I didn’t even know I had one. I wasn’t playing against defenders. I was keeping my own team from seeing the game.
Information hoarding, masquerading as leadership
I lead companies with a few hundred people. And by nature, I’m private. Need-to-know. Pull information, don’t push it.
I used to think I was protecting the team from distraction and from bad news, but mostly, I was protecting myself. I believed that if something mattered, people would ask. But most of the time, they don’t know what to ask.
A few years ago, before Tara’s complaint finally cut through, I saw what real transparency could look like.
It was in a management meeting at my portfolio company in Seoul.
I had a good conversation with one of my employees from the Seoul company over iced Americanos, the national beverage of South Korea.
Three minutes later, a second employee walked in and started answering the questions I had asked the previous person. Word for word, and in order.
The employees from my portfolio company in Seoul had been texting each other in the gap between meetings. My Korean teammates had demonstrated the perfect information handoff.
It was humbling, and instructive. Information flowed between them like water. I was the one slowing it down. What I thought was control was a constraint.
It was efficient. It was mutual trust. They didn’t need a meeting to align because the team was already in sync. I was building for silence, and they were built for clarity.
What changed for Tara
The week after Seoul, I started sharing our monthly actuals with the broader operating team. Not just the numbers Tara needed for her work, but the whole picture: revenue trends, margin pressures, departmental variances.
Within two weeks, Tara had:
- Identified three budget categories where we were consistently over-allocating.
- Spotted a vendor contract auto-renewing at inflated rates.
- Flagged irregular spending patterns I’d missed.
The complaints stopped. She didn’t need less work. She needed to see the scoreboard.
I used to think I had to be the smartest person in the room when I just needed to stop being the most guarded. Once I started sharing more, especially the ugly stuff, we tightened our margins, caught issues earlier, and found our way to a good exit for investors.
The leadership team could see what I was seeing, and could challenge me, and we both got better for it.
The real cost of hoarding information
When leaders hoard information, we think we’re maintaining competitive advantage. Instead, we’re creating information asymmetry within our own organizations because we have more or better information than our employees.
Your team can’t adjust if they can’t see your pattern. They can’t improve what they can’t measure. They can’t celebrate wins they don’t know happened.
Kobe’s edge came from being unreadable. In business, that was the problem. My edge came when I stopped hiding the scoreboard and let the team play the whole game.
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Shayne Fitz-Coy
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