Did you have the opportunity to watch any of Mary Barra’s testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight panel? I only saw snippets of it, but from what I saw I would not like to have been in her seat. As I listened to the panel grill her, and heard her responses and saw her steady composure, I had to wonder what I would have done in that situation. But whether she was composed or—on the flip side—not emotional enough was not so important to me. What struck me were her responses to the questions about what she knew or did not know about the defective ignition switches.

What caught my attention was her saying “I don’t know” so many times. It may have been that she was coached to do that by her legal team. But it may also have been because she really didn’t know, and that made me begin to wonder how much I don’t know about my own organization.

I decided to take what I saw of her testimony to my senior staff and use it as a teaching opportunity. At our next meeting I talked about it with that group. I reinforced the importance of communication, stressing that over-communication is never a bad thing even if it can be tiresome at times.

Every day every one of these senior managers makes decisions about situations they encounter, and each time they do they routinely decide—consciously or not—whether or not to tell me about it. Of course, I want them as managers to make those decisions and they know they have the authority to do so. The issue is whether or not to keep me informed. Each manager has to learn which decisions I expect to be told about, and which decisions they can just move on from after making them. For each one of these managers, getting to that point is a trial-and-error process that involves them getting to know me and me getting to know them, and that takes time.

Our management team is mostly a veteran group, but that doesn’t mean each individual needs the same amount of time to reach that level of mutual understanding with me. In fact, I had decided before the meeting how well I felt each one of them does in keeping me informed, and I rank-ordered them in my mind. Then I shared my rank-order with them at the meeting.

They handled it well, as I expected they would. We ended up having what I think was a constructive discussion. It helped me to understand their point of view. I learned, I think, that often enough when they withhold information from me it is out of concern that I already have so many issues on my plate that they should not add another one to them. Fair enough, so I gave them a rule of thumb to follow: When in doubt, share the information and trust me that I will not think less of them as managers for having shared it. But they were right to remind me that I owe it to them to find the right balance between letting them do their jobs and micromanaging them.

I made it clear to them that I do not expect them to use information as power by choosing to share it or withhold it based on some personal agenda. I don’t believe any of them have done that or would do it, but it was important to make that point.

Above all, I don’t ever want to find myself in the kind of embarrassing situation that Barra was (maybe) in. I don’t ever expect to testify before Congress, but I do not want to find out something I should already have known about from a client or a board member or some other outside party.

I suspect that like me, lots of business leaders have nightmares about what goes on below them that they don’t know about it. I felt like I was watching such a nightmare play out in Ms. Barra’s testimony before Congress. It comes with the territory, I guess. The only way to make the nightmare go away, if that is actually possible, is to keep building trust with your management team. That is hard work, but very necessary.