What employees can’t take is being shut out, that is the AT&T problem, the reason employees come to distrust their managers is not because their managers told them something bad, but because they told them nothing at all. A company’s belief that employees are too stupid to notice that something is going on, or too immature to handle uncertainty and change, is interpreted, rightfully, as disrespectful.
We scratch our heads and wonder why 40 to 70 percent of big changes fail to deliver their financial benefits. A company’s commitment to secrecy makes failure almost a certainty.