Appreciation post: Sticking to my guns when asked to hide a mistake

Back when I was in sales, my manager once told me to not mention a shipping delay to a big client. He said it was just a small thing and we could fix it before they noticed. I felt really torn because I liked my manager, but lying felt wrong. In my experience, clients find out eventually and trust is hard to get back. I decided to be honest and told the client about the delay right away, offering a discount for the trouble. It was scary, and my manager was upset with me for a while. But the client stayed with us and even praised our transparency. Your mileage may vary, but for me, being straight with people always works out better in the end.

3 comments

3 Comments

gray_white29d ago

Big companies often have such slow internal updates that clients never hear about a small delay. This lets some managers get away with hiding problems for a long time. Your story shows why that's a risky game, even if it seems to work at first.

abbyk1029d ago

Sometimes hiding small delays is the only way to keep a project moving forward. If every tiny hitch caused a client alert, nothing would ever get done because of all the panic and meetings. A good manager knows how to smooth over minor bumps without making them into big deals, which actually shows more skill than causing a fuss over nothing. Those internal buffers exist for a reason, to let teams fix things without the whole outside world watching.

barbarahill14d ago

That part about slow internal updates is so true. It reminds me of a friend at a big tech firm who had a server go down for three days. The internal alerts never made it past middle management because they were scared to report it. By the time clients noticed, they had lost way more trust than if they'd just sent an early "we're fixing it" email. Those small silences can turn into a real avalanche of trouble.