Why I Don’t Promise to Keep Secrets

When someone starts off with, “Between you and me…”, “In confidence…”, “Off the record…”, etc., I stop them, immediately, and tell them this story.

Back in 1993 I was a middle manager at Home Savings of America, managing a group of income property workout officers. I was based in Los Angeles, and some of my direct reports were in New York. On one of my trips to New York, a peer manager based in New York who also reported to my boss took me aside and said she would like to talk to me about a problem, but that I had to promise to keep it in confidence.

I agreed. Everybody likes a secret, and being taken into someone’s confidence is flattering. It developed that one of my officers disagreed with her handling of some issues, and the dispute had ended with some very inflammatory comments by my employee which clearly fell in the category of sexual harassment.

If you work for a company of any size you have been through sexual harassment trainings (probably more than once), and pretty much everyone now knows if this sort of thing occurs it gets reported to the Human Resources department, end of story. But, those guidelines were not in place in 1993. I also knew that the proper handling of this would have been for the woman to report it to our boss, but I also knew why she didn’t. Our boss would have handled the problem with a hammer, and the New York manager was hoping I would take a gentler approach to solving the problem.

Which I did, starting with a strong talk with my employee which left him badly shaken and contrite, and an apology from him to the woman he harassed. I followed up a few weeks later with the New York manager, and she was happy with the result. I was feeling good.

Until a week later, when my boss called me into her office and (justifiably) ripped me a new one for leaving her out of the loop. It seems the story was just too good for the New York manager to keep to herself, and the people she told thought it was too good to keep to themselves, and eventually the story made its way to my boss.

If a secret is so compelling it needs to be a secret, it’s so compelling it will eventually come out. Now, when someone starts to tell me a secret, I stop them and tell them that I will act as I see appropriate, which may mean disclosing the secret. I share the above story with them. Almost always they tell me anyway, and I am free to take the appropriate action without tying myself in knots trying to preserve confidentiality.