Personally, I’m okay with not being informed about everything that’s going on. I work at a big enough company that I couldn’t possibly know what goes on all the way up the management chain, but even if I worked at a small startup, I could understand if management didn’t want to be fully transparent. I don’t need to know; it’s none of my business. But I won’t stand being lied to – even about small things, or things I don’t even care about in their own right. I see lies as a breach of trust and as a sign that I can’t trust that person, moving forward.
So it depends on what you mean by “not get into it”. If you really stick to truthful statements, and if there isn’t a high enough prior expectation of transparency to make it amount to a lie of omission, then leaving it at “good job” is perfectly fine. But if you do lie… well, if I find out, I’m probably leaving.
If leadership doesn't fix the problem then just resign in protest.
EDIT: It's now occurring to me that there's probably different schools of thought here. Yes, I've resigned in protest on behalf of my workers before.
If my team is getting fucked, then I've either failed my team, or my purpose is meaningless. Either way, get me out.
And so you take your first step down the path.. "I'm not sure" is a lie here.
Are you lying to the team when you say, "we're not sure how this happened" rather than just quoting the git blame?
Well, no. The problem is much more complicated than a buggy commit. It's a wider problem with the system. So you say "we don't know, we have to look more into it" and do a post mortem because that is the honest truth.
The same principle applies here. So-and-so highly respected person committed a real-life communication bug that got merged into this IC's production career. But the problem is much more complicated than that. You don't know what the actual problem is until you address it with the leadership team.
As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.
I've been close to situations where the ICs did their absolute best and it was a total waste because of politics outside of their control. Do you tell them that so-and-so highly-respected person was shit-talking them because of an unrelated agenda and invalidated all of their work? Or do you tell them good job (it was a good job) and not get into it?