Comment by metric10

Sounds like both a lack of trust and communication between you and the team.

> If you have better metrics or management skills than what everyone in the world has figured out, myself and many others would gladly adopt these approaches.

Oh boy...

edit: One issue might be they fear that bad news will lead to a knee jerk reaction that gets them or their teammates fired. They should feel comfortable to encounter problems and openly discuss them in the open with out fear of repercussions. In fact, I would argue this is one of the major advantages of a team; pooling collective knowledge and abilities. If people fear honest communication then the performance of the team is impacted. The manager has the greatest ability to fix this, IMHO...