I once had a client that decided to cancel a project before they had anything prepared for the team to work on next. This was actually a great opportunity; the team could have spent that time improving their own skills, paying back some technical debt, or catching up on the thousands of things that normally don’t get attention.
Except management chose not to tell the team that the work was cancelled. For the next month, they let the team believe that they were still building something that was going to be shipped and that customers were waiting for.
Of course, when the next work was ready and management told the team that the original work was cancelled, it didn’t take long for them to figure out what had happened. To realize how disrespectfully they’d been treated.
I never found out why management made that decision. The possible explanations include poor planning (waiting until the next work was ready before saying anything), avoidance (not wanting a difficult conversation), or protecting their own position.
The most charitable explanation is also the most interesting one: they may have genuinely believed the team needed to think the work was real in order to stay motivated. That the fiction was doing something useful. That people work harder when they believe customers are waiting.
That belief is worth examining, because it has a real cost that we don’t often consider.
What SDT says about what happened
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is built on three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The motivation model that I’ve written about before is one of several frameworks that sit on top of those needs, but the needs themselves are the core of the theory. Meet more of these needs and motivation moves toward intrinsic (the strongest motivator). Strip them away and it moves toward amotivation (the weakest). Deception attacks all three.
Autonomy is the need to feel in control of your own behaviors and goals. It doesn’t require complete freedom, although it does mean having genuine choices within whatever constraints exist. The team thought they had autonomy; choosing how to build something real, making daily decisions about the work. Those decisions were all made inside a false frame. The choice was never real.
Competence is the need to feel effective and capable. A month of work that will never ship is a month of effort that meant nothing. When the truth came out, every decision they’d made, every problem they’d solved, every trade-off they’d carefully worked through, none of it counted. That’s not just demoralizing. It directly undermines the team’s sense of competence.
Relatedness is the need to feel connected to others, and to matter to the people you work with. Relationships have a baseline requirement of honesty. What the team discovered wasn’t just that a project got cancelled. It was that management had looked them in the eye every day for a month and lied. That’s a different kind of damage, and it doesn’t recover quickly.
The thing that makes this worse
Management didn’t just lie to the team. They used the lie to fill a gap that could have been genuinely valuable.
A month of self-directed work, choosing what skills to develop, what debt to pay back, what long-standing annoyances to finally fix, is not a consolation prize. For most teams it’s almost never available.
I’ve written before about a team that had exactly that kind of window handed to them, and what they made of it. That window, given honestly, would have been intrinsically motivating in exactly the way SDT describes. High autonomy (you choose the work). High competence (you work on things you already understand and care about). High relatedness (the team collaborates on improvements they all feel the value of).
Management didn’t just fail to support motivation. They took something that would have supported it and replaced it with nothing.
What honesty would have cost
The truth, told early, would have had a price. It might have been an uncomfortable conversation with either the team or with their own management. Probably some uncertainty for the team while they figured out what to work on. Maybe some frustration.
The deception cost the team’s trust in management. It cost their belief that their work was real. It cost a month of motivation that could have gone somewhere useful. And it cost significant goodwill once they’d worked out what had happened.
The instinct to protect people from bad news often comes from a good place. The cost of that protection is almost always underestimated, because managers rarely see the full invoice. The team doesn’t walk into your office and tell you that they no longer believe you. They just become slightly harder to motivate next time. And again the time after that.
The next time
The next time you’re sitting on bad news, the question isn’t how long you can wait before telling your team. It’s what you’re trading away while you do.
If you’d like help with that then let’s talk.