What Machiavelli Teaches Leaders About Bad News
The people who know a plan is failing may also have the most to lose by saying so. Leadership begins with changing that calculation.
Imagine a project review in which every department reports that the launch is on schedule. Afterward, an engineer quietly tells a colleague that a critical dependency has failed. A manager already knows the customer commitment is unrealistic. Neither raised the problem in the meeting.
The executive leaves with a reassuring answer to the wrong question. Everyone has confirmed that the plan remains acceptable to discuss. The plan’s actual condition remains uncertain.
This hypothetical scene captures a problem Machiavelli understood: authority changes the information that reaches the person exercising it. A leader can command a room while becoming poorly informed about the work outside it.
The ruler helps create the flatterer
In chapter XXIII of The Prince, Machiavelli treats flattery as a danger intensified by the ruler’s own satisfaction with himself. His proposed remedy requires the ruler to make truthful advice welcome, choose capable advisers, question them broadly, and listen patiently before deciding. The responsibility therefore reaches beyond the honesty of the people providing counsel. It includes the conduct of the person receiving it. Read The Prince, chapter XXIII.
The prescription also has a historical limit. Machiavelli reserves this freedom for selected advisers and for subjects on which the prince asks their opinion. He is protecting princely authority while improving its judgment. A modern organization needs wider reporting routes, including ways to raise a danger the leader has never thought to ask about.
That limit makes the comparison more useful. We can recognize the problem he identifies while designing a different institutional response.
In The Psychology of Machiavelli: How Human Behavior Became a Science of Power, I argue that Machiavelli deserves recognition as the father of organizational psychology through intellectual parentage. His examination of authority, dependence, judgment, and conduct makes that argument possible. The claim concerns the formation of an approach to understanding behavior. It does not assign him the methods or institutions of modern experimental psychology.
An open door can still have a price
An invitation to speak honestly carries little weight when employees have watched honesty damage someone else’s career. The formal invitation and the remembered consequence compete. A prudent employee has reason to consider both.
Research gives this problem a modern empirical setting. James Detert and Ethan Burris studied 3,149 employees and 223 managers in a restaurant chain. Managerial openness was more consistently associated with improvement-oriented employee voice than transformational leadership was, after the study’s controls. Its two-phase design supports a careful association, rather than proof that a particular managerial gesture will cause candor everywhere. Detert and Burris, 2007.
Status also affects who experiences an invitation as usable. In a study of 23 neonatal intensive care units, Ingrid Nembhard and Amy Edmondson found support for relationships linking leader inclusiveness, psychological safety, professional status, and participation in improvement work. Words and actions that invite contributions matter in a hierarchy where some voices carry more standing than others. Nembhard and Edmondson, 2006.
These studies do not retroactively turn Machiavelli’s observations into modern research findings. They help us investigate a related question with contemporary methods: what makes speaking up seem possible to the person who has something consequential to say?
Give bad news a usable route
A leader can begin by separating three activities that are often compressed into one uncomfortable exchange: reporting a fact, interpreting its significance, and deciding what to do.
An employee should be able to report that a test failed without first proving that the whole strategy is mistaken. Someone close to the work may possess an important observation and still lack the authority or information to propose a complete solution. Requiring every problem to arrive with its remedy can filter out early warnings.
Ask questions that make uncertainty discussable. Which assumption has the weakest evidence? What would force us to revise the deadline? Which concern have we discussed privately but omitted from this review? Specific questions offer more direction than a general request for objections.
Timing matters, too. Collect independent assessments before the most senior person announces a preferred answer. Once a position becomes associated with the leader’s judgment, disagreeing may feel like challenging the leader personally. Written input can help preserve an observation before the meeting begins to reshape it.
Next, make the response predictable. Thank the person for identifying the issue, establish what is known, and assign the next check. A report can be mistaken. A concern can be overstated. Investigating its quality should remain distinct from punishing its arrival.
That distinction does not suspend accountability for deliberate deception or misconduct. It makes accountability more precise. The employee who reveals a missed target and the employee who falsifies progress should not learn that both disclosures produce the same reaction.
Finally, close the loop. Tell people whether their concern changed the decision, triggered an investigation, or was rejected after review. Explain why. Otherwise, the organization can learn that speaking is permitted but inconsequential, which provides another reason for silence.
Test the information system you have built
Consider the last three unwelcome facts that reached you. Who brought them? How late did they arrive? What happened to the person who raised each one? Who already knew?
These questions are more revealing than asking whether you consider yourself approachable. They examine the route information actually traveled and the consequences attached to carrying it.
A useful review also looks for missing voices. If every concern comes through the same senior adviser, access to the leader may have become a bottleneck. Direct operational reporting, independent review, and protected escalation channels can reveal different parts of the same problem.
Machiavelli makes the ruler responsible for the quality of the counsel he can obtain. Today’s leader can extend that responsibility into the design of meetings, reporting systems, and everyday responses. The practical test is whether a difficult fact can reach someone able to act while the fact is still useful.
Explore the book’s central argument about Machiavelli, behavior, and power.
Published 2026-10-21. Last updated 2026-10-21. For attribution and republication guidance, use the newsroom story desk.