how much should information should be shared?

Most teams work under project management guide lines. i.e. every body else in the team know what work every other person is doing and also the deadlines for each tasks.

But (a big but), most teams or groups don't work this way. The internal politics dictates that one does not know what his team-mate sitting next to him is working on. Also the priority of that task to the company is kept hidden. Now why does this happen? i.e even inside a professionally managed project, you have some people 'in the know' about everything and most of the workers are not at all aware. Is this a need-to-know basis management ?

while this kind of model perpetrates the status quo and the powers that be,it does hit the moral of the team members. I have seen this every-ware from the top multinationals to nimble startups.

I wonder what kind of team and task management is carried out in ING America,Southwest airlines, Toyota, threadless.com, 37Signals (they work only 4 days a week), Semco (Ricardo Semler).


after thinking about this for some time, i realized that, the kind of openness and trust that I was expecting being an employee is not available in 99.99% of the companies. Unless you are a founder, you will not know everything that is going on in your company.

I guess, I would like to create a culture where each employee is trusted and he brings his best work to work. A place where results matter as much as the people. does your work place have such a culture?


:)