While a little whitewashing may be beneficial when dealing with external factors, it is most definitely not appropriate for a group leader working with direct reports. When you enter into a new environment, you need to establish yourself as someone people can rely on, and can look to, for leadership.
I have, of course, a great example of why this rule is important. I had been working at Echo Communications for only about three months, when we hired a new engineering manager to oversee myself and two other server engineers. He came with great credentials; he was the fourth engineer at what had become a gigantic web portal (before it flamed out a few years earlier). I actually talked to him for a short bit late one evening, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. I know now to grill candidates before signing off on them, particularly if you're going to be working for them.
We were in a cramped little office in Palo Alto, so cramped that if I backed my chair up a little too much, I'd bump into the guy sitting behind me. I'd been working on several pieces of software for the service we were building out, and had been happily busy, cranking things out. Our little team didn't get together that much, I figured they were busy doing other things, so we just kept trundling along.
Our new manager started on a Monday. He sat in that chair right behind me, the one I would hit if I stood up carelessly. For the first four days, he barely said anything to me, aside from perhaps a short "hello" in the morning. I don't really remember him even leaving his desk, for the most part, and since I sat in a position where I could see the other two engineers, I don't remember seeing him talking to them much, either.
That first Friday, he called an engineering meeting together. He opened it up by saying that he'd been spending the last few days talking to everyone to see where our software was. This, of course, came as a complete shock to me, as he very obviously hadn't talked to me during this time, and I'd been working on some key pieces of our development. Immediately, I became suspicious of his abilities to lead even just the three of us.
Perhaps he had talked to "everyone" -- in upper management. But that's not what he said. In fact, at least in my case, his first four days "on the job" involved no communications with one of his direct reports -- one that was sitting right next to him the whole time. This was not a good way for him to establish him a group leader. It would not be too long before he would demonstrate to me that not only was he not a very good leader, but he wasn't actually much of an engineer, either (so leading by example was right out). Shortly after a disastrous meeting where he opined a fairly ridiculous idea for our system (one which, when I've talked to many other engineers about it, they agreed with me), I realized that one of the other engineers was a complete suckup (or the same kind of moron the manager was), and the other engineer simply didn't care. I gave notice not long after that.
A leader must instill a sense of trust in their followers. A person follows a leader not only because they believe they know what they're doing, but also because they trust that they know what they're doing. Starting off that relationship with lies, half-truths, or no attempt to build trust at all is simply a recipe for disaster.