Seeking out the bad news as a manager rather than waiting for it to come to you seems like a good skill (providing you don’t always seek entirely negative news all the time). It also avoids one of the common traps of upper management: believing you have an “open door” policy when people truly have to get past double lines of reinforced management in order to tell you anything, which may be met by hostility, or worse, on your part as manager.

A summary from the article of this particular facet of management:

Simple human nature is part of the problem: No one likes to hear bad news, no matter how useful it may be. Managers who appear to blame the messengers bringing word of, say, poor sales or a competitor’s inroads, can easily discourage future reports.

Niko Canner, the managing partner of Katzenbach Partners, a consulting firm based in New York, said that when an employee comes to him with news of actual or potential problems, “I try to deal with bad news in a way that I get more of it rather than less.”

That entails thanking his informant, then discussing ways to resolve the problem and — as a final step — setting aside time in the future to discuss how the problem started. That way, the people delivering bad news realize that they will not be punished for their candor.

That seems like great advice to me.