Meanwhile, the advice is to sugar coat bad situations, which is certainly a flavor of dishonesty. The tier of management matters here. The boss you are eye-to-

Meanwhile, the advice is to sugar coat bad situations, which is certainly a flavor of dishonesty. The tier of management matters here. The boss you are eye-to-eye with should put pragmatism before sunshine. The boss' boss and above are all probably better off being pathologically positive in front of their direct report's subordinates each. Your immediate boss really should tune into the personality of their team members both individually and in aggregate in group settings. With luck, you were hand-picked by your boss and that means aspects of your personality are preferred, aka: culture fit. Sardonic cynical attitudes are reasonable, when trading humor and letting off steam, which boosts morale, but as with all performance, timing is everything, and good teammates understand this implicitly. If shit is getting real, people owe it to each other to deliver solid news and not bullshit whitewash, but in group settings rumor mills are deadly, and information has to be controlled to prevent panics. Good captains go down with the ship. They signal when to use the life boats. Would you rather have a boss who is sunshine all day, right up until the moment they fly the coop, and are never seen again? In practice this is almost invariably a really bad thing. Because even if your boss sucked, their boss will fill the intervening position with almost anyone (declining in-group promotions), and permit them next manager to reshape their team of direct reports as needed, which can disintegrate into a slow motion bloodbath of firings. The reverse of a manager's disappearing act is the mass layoff, surprising a large class of subordinates (your boss disappears because, in fact, the company disappears as you lose your job). The inverse of a manager's disappearing act is he subordinate rage-quitting (a single subordinate employee disappearing, without other employees depending on their role is reasonable and conscionable, although stress is still induced by such an event).