My "no surprises" policy

At OY I invented an informal No Surprises policy. My idea was, communication should be open enough that there are no nasty surprises. So for example, if I was having a midterm meeting with a student intern and her university professor, I shouldn't have lots of criticism the intern had never heard before. I considered it my obligation to be up front with her when I had a problem, so we/she could address it, rather than holding onto some gripe and surprising her with it later on. If I hadn't been up front with her, I'd be in violation of the No Surprises policy.

Another example: If someone I manage messes up, I want to hear about it from them ASAP. If I find out a week later through the grapevine, because people are talking about the mess-up and related fallout, that's not cool.

So basically, if everyone's respecting the policy, nobody should ever have to ask: "Why didn't I know about this sooner? Why didn't you tell me?"

I also asked employees/interns to communicate with each other. So if someone came to me with a problem about a co-worker, before I'd take the problem into my own hands, I'd ask if they'd raised this issue directly with the co-worker first. And if not, what's in the way of that? Because I'd ideally want that to happen before getting involved as a manager.

Part of my problem with how I left OY was, I learned through the grapevine that in the rush to get rid of me, people had come up with all kinds of complaints about what I did badly, or could have done better, or whatever. They evidently came up with a performance review, which I never actually saw, but which was horribly negative. And people hadn't been giving me horribly negative feedback for a long time; in fact a couple months earlier, all but one board member said they thought I was doing a satisfactory job.

It's not fair to spring all that stuff on an employee, once it's too late to do anything about it, when you didn't have the guts/competence/integrity to bring it to them first. (It's also not fair to gin up a bunch of criticism in an effort to rationalize the decision to fire someone, and I suspect that was a part of it too.)