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You ask your engineer a simple question: “What happened with the deployment yesterday?”
Instead of a direct answer, you get a wall of text. Context about what they were trying to do. Explanations of why the approach made sense at the time. Caveats about the documentation being unclear. A timeline of events that somehow takes four paragraphs to explain a ten-minute incident.
You’re frustrated. Why can’t they just say what happened?
They’re not being evasive. They’re being defensive. And the difference matters enormously for what you do next.
The signal in verbose communication
When someone over-explains, they’re not trying to waste your time. They’re trying to protect themselves. Every extra paragraph, every caveat, every “just to give you context” is an attempt to preemptively address criticism they expect to receive.
This isn’t a communication skills problem. It’s a psychological safety problem.
Early in my management career, I had a team where incident reports read like legal depositions. Every mistake came with pages of justification. I thought the team just needed training on concise communication. I even put together a presentation on “effective status updates”.
It didn’t help. If anything, the reports got longer.
What I eventually realised was that I’d inherited a team that had been burned before. The previous manager had a habit of assigning blame in public. Small mistakes became big deals. People had learned that the safest response to any question was to build a fortress of context around their answer before anyone could attack them.
The verbose communication wasn’t the problem. It was a symptom of something I had the power to change.
The cost of defensive communication
Before we talk about fixing this, let’s be clear about why it matters beyond just annoying meetings.
When your team communicates defensively, you’re paying for it in ways that don’t show up on any dashboard.
You’re getting filtered information. People who are worried about blame don’t volunteer bad news early. They wait until problems are undeniable, which usually means they’re also bigger and more expensive to fix.
Your meetings take twice as long. Every question becomes a negotiation. People pad their estimates, hedge their commitments, and qualify their updates. You leave meetings less sure about what’s actually happening than when you got in.
Your best people leave. Strong engineers hate environments where they have to perform accountability theatre instead of just solving problems. They’ll stick around for a while, but not for long.
You’re training the wrong instincts. Junior engineers who learn to communicate defensively carry those habits with them. You’re not just dealing with the current cost - you’re compounding it over time.
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What actually builds trust
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: if your team communicates defensively, the most likely explanation is that somewhere, somehow, they learned it was necessary. Maybe from you, maybe from your organisation, maybe from a previous role. But the pattern exists because it worked.
Your job is to make it stop working. Not by punishing defensive communication, but by making direct communication safer.
Own your mistakes publicly and specifically. Not the vague “we all make mistakes” platitude. Actual, specific, recent mistakes. “I underestimated how long the compliance review would take, and that’s why we’re scrambling now. My bad, I am sorry.” When your team sees you do this without consequences, they start to believe it might be safe for them too.
Respond to bad news with curiosity, not criticism. This is harder than it sounds. When someone tells you they broke something, your first instinct might be frustration. That’s fine - you’re human. But what you say out loud matters. “Interesting, what happened?” lands very differently than “How did this happen?”
Separate the incident from the retrospective. When something breaks, the only question that matters in the moment is “how do we fix it?” Save the “how do we prevent this” conversation for later, when everyone’s calmer and the stakes feel lower. Mixing them together teaches people that admitting fault means immediately facing an interrogation.
Reward directness explicitly. When someone gives you a straight answer - especially about something that went wrong - acknowledge it. “Thanks for being direct about this. It’s really helpful.” This sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but many managers never do it. We acknowledge good work, but we rarely acknowledge good communication about bad work.
The conversation you need to have
If you’ve identified that your team has a defensive communication pattern, you can’t just wait for it to change. You need to address it directly. Here’s a version of a conversation I’ve had that worked:
“I’ve noticed that when I ask questions about problems or incidents, I often get a lot of context before I get the actual answer. I want to be clear: I’m not looking for shorter answers because I don’t care about context. I’m wondering if there’s something about how I’m responding that makes it feel unsafe to just say ‘yeah, I broke that’.”
Hear what people have to say.
This conversation is uncomfortable. You might hear things you don’t want to hear about your own behaviour, or about the organisation’s culture. That’s okay. The discomfort is the point - it signals that you’re taking this seriously enough to be vulnerable yourself.
The long game
Trust builds slowly and breaks quickly. Even if you do everything right starting today, it might take months before your team’s communication patterns shift. They’re watching to see if this is real or just another management initiative that’ll fade away.
Be patient, but be consistent. Every time you respond well to bad news, you’re making a deposit. Every time you respond poorly, you’re withdrawing from an account that might not have much in it.
The engineers on your team who communicate directly and own their mistakes aren’t doing it because they have some personality trait you wish everyone else had. They’re doing it because somewhere along the way, someone made it safe for them.
You can be that person for your team. It just takes practice - and the willingness to go first.
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See you in the next one,
~ Stephane