Stated openly by American managers as a standing instruction: I don’t like surprises, tell me early, bad news does not improve with age. The instruction concedes that the news may be bad, and asks for it anyway. What is being forbidden is not the problem but the concealment.
Verbs of pushing
Flag it. Escalate it. Socialize it. Share it out. Circulate. Cascade it down. Give me a heads up. Ping me. American business English has an unusually large set of verbs for moving information outward, and almost all of them take the holder as the subject. The holder acts.
Whistleblower bounties
The Dodd-Frank Act directs the SEC to pay a person who voluntarily provides original information leading to a successful enforcement action a share of the money recovered, where sanctions exceed a million dollars. Not protection from retaliation, though that exists too. Payment. The law attaches a financial reward to pushing information out.
FYI
American email produced a three-letter abbreviation for sending information to someone who did not ask for it and need do nothing with it. It is one of the most-used abbreviations in American business correspondence. The message exists solely to transfer knowledge, and the sender writes it knowing there will be no reply.
Heads up
Advance warning, given unprompted, about something the other person will otherwise meet without preparation. The metaphor is physical — lift your head, something is coming. It is offered as a courtesy, and it is expected as one.
Blindsided
The American word for being harmed by information you were not given, borrowed from football, where the hit comes from the side the player cannot see. The word places no fault on the person hit. All of it falls on whoever saw what was coming and said nothing.
The reproach
Why am I just hearing about this now? Nobody told me. A heads up would have been nice. I had to find out from someone else. I was the last to know.
Five standard American complaints, and every one of them is aimed at the person who held the information rather than at the person who failed to ask for it.
Need to know
The phrase exists in American English and comes from military and intelligence practice, where it is a legitimate principle. Used anywhere else, it is an accusation. Describing a colleague as operating on a need-to-know basis is a criticism of that person, and they will hear it as one.