The Full Disclosure Mandate (and Why You Should Never Issue One)

One of the enduring truths of human systems, whether they involve financial markets or merely an HR department, is that a perfectly specified performance obligation will often yield perfectly undesirable results. Consider the case of an employee, working under a manager described only as an “old-school old-battleaxe,” who received a directive: “Report everything that happens on these files - or else.” This, friends, is what we in the business might call the Comprehensive Disclosure Doctrine, a surprisingly robust, if somewhat disintermediated, information transmission mechanism.

The manager, presumably, desired some information, perhaps of a type that would reinforce pre-existing narratives or identify minor transgressions to be disciplined. What they received, however, was everything. This is where the malicious compliance kicks in: the employee, adhering to the literal text of the mandate, meticulously documented every single occurrence, presumably including the manager’s own operational inefficiencies or interpersonal foibles. It’s a classic Principal-Agent problem, where the principal (manager) sets a rule, and the agent (employee) interprets it with an unforeseen (to the principal) degree of fidelity. The manager, having asked for a firehose, then seemed surprised by the deluge.

Now, the employee was, in the event, laid off three months later. In fairness to the Reddit commenter “mizinamo,” who observed that being laid off “3 minutes later – damn, that’s rough,” it does feel like a surprisingly efficient feedback loop for a system ostensibly designed to protect the problematic. Because this brings us to the core irony, as noted by commenters like _Kramerica_ and Infamous-Ad-5262: the stubborn persistence of ‘problematic employees’ (and managers) who seem impervious to normal corporate hygiene. The Infamous-Ad-5262 doctrine, commonly known as “shit rises to the top,” suggests that dysfunctional leadership often remains entrenched, sometimes for years, until a truly spectacular failure—or, in this case, a strict adherence to one’s own poorly conceived rules—forces the issue. When the gatekeeper of information is forced to become the conduit, the cost of ignorance can become catastrophically apparent. Seems efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ way.