A while back, my former colleague, Vera, wrote a great piece on implicit bias in the workplace. I knew about unconscious bias, gender bias, affinity bias and some others too, but that article lined up even more variations. It is one of those posts that makes you sit back and go: “I’ve been guilty of that”.
It also made me think about a pattern I encountered later at Playrix — one that doesn’t appear on most bias lists, but that I’d been guilty of long before anyone named it for me. It’s called Positive Reporting, and I definitely lived it when I moved to Cyprus to set up Tactile’s new branch.
I was doing it solo – no blueprint, no precedent within the company. Just me, the mission and the slowest banking system in the EU. I sent progress reports back to the head office regularly. And every week I’d find something good to lead with: “Great news, found a local accountant!”, “Good progress on the legal entity setup!” And then, somewhere down in paragraph four was: “The banking situation continues to present some challenges.”
I wasn’t lying and the good stuff was real. But I was packaging everything in a way that left people feeling like things were basically fine, which they were not in the beginning. I was doing it because I wanted to look competent and autonomous, to show that I’ve got this. Which was also true! But the framing misrepresented the situation, making it less transparent and delaying the moment someone with more leverage could actually help.
What positive reporting is and what it isn’t
Let’s make this clear: the Positive Reporting is not about lying or changing the facts to make it look better. It’s when the overall impression you create doesn’t match the actual state of things because you’ve sandwiched the bad news between enough good news to make it feel manageable.
I bet you’ve seen something like this:
“We hit our milestone on time, the team is in great shape, though we are slightly behind on the core feature – but we’re working on a plan”.
From this message, it’s absolutely not clear how big the delay is, how the team plans to manage it. And you have to dig into this with questions like “What is going on exactly? What do we miss to get back on track?”
Is the message wrong by itself? No, but it’s less transparent and more complex to decode, which tangles the communication unnecessarily. So I had to teach myself to be more direct with my messages.
And when I joined Playrix, I encountered something I hadn’t seen explicitly named before: a cultural rule against “Positive Reporting”. The idea isn’t to stop celebrating wins or ignore what’s going well but to make sure problems aren’t wearing a costume made of good news. If something is broken, the person reading your report needs to clearly understand that it’s broken, not get gently reassured.
Where this comes from
The desire to report positively is very human. Nobody wants to be the person who only brings problems. Nobody wants to look like they can’t handle things. And in many work cultures people get side-eyed for raising flags without a solution already in their hands.
But here’s what I learned the hard way in Cyprus: the problem doesn’t make you look incompetent. Hiding it does.
Because when the problem surfaces (and it always does – check lesson number four here) – the first question stakeholders ask isn’t “Why couldn’t you fix it?”. It’s “why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
Saying “I have a serious problem and I don’t have the solution yet, but here’s what I’m doing about it” is not weakness. It’s exactly what a leader should say. It builds trust. It gives others the chance to help. And it forces you to be honest with yourself about the actual state of things, which is the first step toward fixing them.
How to catch yourself doing it
Read your last project update, status report or team message. Then ask:
- If someone reads only the first and last sentence, what impression do they get?
- Is the most important piece of information the most prominent one?
- Am I leading with good news because it’s the most relevant or because I want to soften what comes next?
Imagine you’re reporting to yourself. Would you feel adequately alarmed? Would you know what actually needs attention? If not, then something is buried.
The fix isn’t to strip out the positives – it’s to change the hierarchy. Lead with what matters most. If there’s a problem – that should be the headline. Good news and context can follow (kind of relates to the Big Rock method).
Remind yourself that you, the team, the stakeholders – you are all in the same boat and you don’t have to fight the issue alone, so don’t be hesitant to highlight it explicitly.
Playrix’s no-positive-reporting rule isn’t about pessimism. It’s about creating an environment where people trust that when a status says “Things are fine” – things are actually fine. That kind of trust is worth a lot more than the short-term comfort of a cushioned message.
So next time you’re drafting a report and you find yourself leading with something good before getting to something bad – pause. Ask whether that order is serving the reader, or just serving you.
Chances are, the headline you’ve been burying deserves to be at the top.
Retrieving Thoughts 