I was reading this particular post on the Great Leadership blog, titled Ethics And Leadership, and instead of rehashing the entire tale I'm going to encourage you to click on the link and read the story for yourself. I will talk about its concept overall, though.

Sometimes things just don't go right. None of us are perfect, so things are going to go wrong from time to time. No one with any real sense is going to get upset over mistakes or breakdowns that occur every once in awhile. What people get upset with are two things. One, not knowing that there was a potential problem, especially if someone else knew about it, and two, allowing problems to keep occurring time and time again instead of making the correction needed to move forward.

I'm someone who's always believed that it's better to tell the person I'm reporting to that something isn't acting right, or hasn't been acting right, than to let them find out from someone else later. However, I've also always believed that if I can, I'm going to offer a suggestion, or go ahead and put through the correction, so that when I tell what has happened, I can also say what was done or can be done to fix things.

As a consultant, oftentimes management won't divulge things to me because they believe it makes them look bad, but their employees tell me a lot of things. Then I have a chance to get things fixed, which makes employees happy and existing management scrambling instead of embracing the help. Then they feel that they need to explain themselves in front of the people they ultimate report to instead of just owning up to the flaws and being happy that some of them can be fixed.

So, if you discover problems, or someone else discovers them, embrace them and fix them, then move on. Be honest; if you read the story, you'll see that if you're not, sometimes you're found out.