The Art of Transparency

Transparence is important to the creation of the emotional stability of a team because it is essential to trust building and trust building is central to employee engagement. Managers are not proficient with disseminating information for numerous reasons. One commonly encountered reason is to maintain their power structure. There are employees who demand information they need to perform but sometimes they confuse transparence and confidentiality, demanding information that is private and could cause harm to others. It is important for these employees to recognize their employer has a responsibility to ensure private information is not released to persons who are not authorized to receive it.

When a manager or employee is transparent, they are honest and they are open to releasing information to their coworkers that is essential to its performance. Unproductive emotion escalates when information is released that is confidential. This emotion can intensify when employees confuse transparence and confidentiality because they feel entitled to information that is confidential. For instance, they may demand to know the details of a person’s dismissal while there is a pending court case.
Why Transparence is Rejected

There are multiple reasons why transparence is avoided by both organizational decision-makers and employees. One frequently encountered reason for this is because decision-makers resist sharing and this desire for control can have a number of root causes:

Maintaining a Power Structure. Within a politically charged work environment employees deploy multiple undermining tactics. One is to hoard information because information is cherished as a source of power. Office politicians also deploy dishonesty. This can happen in circumstances where coworkers intentionally mislead each other or when they conceal information from perceived rivals. Another reason power is jealously guarded by leaders is because of incompetence.

Incompetence. Regardless the role of the employee or the level they occupy within the hierarchy, there are persons who are not the right fit for the role they occupy. Not only do they lack the capacity to perform the duties required for the role, they also lack the potential to perform in that particular role. So an elaborate campaign of cover-up can happen where nothing is documented, information is withheld, blind loyalties are formed and favoritism overshadows merit. These persons resist transparence because there is too much to lose.

Persistent adherence to a strategy that works. This is another reason why transparence is not embraced by decision-makers. These decision-makers have a proven formula that works and it is guarded as valiantly as a secret ingredient in a recipe. In this type of environment, employees are given directives; they are not allowed to deviate from prescribed processes so their creativity is suffocated. Executives or business owners who believe if it isn’t broken then it doesn’t need to be fixed are not really interested in innovation from team members because the winning formula continues to provide positive results.

Moving to Transparence
It is now much clearer to organizations of all types that employee engagement is central to the sustainability of the performance of an organization. In an ADP White Paper, entitled, Employee Satisfaction vs. Employee Engagement: Are They the Same Thing? It was suggested that, “By focusing more on employee engagement, organizations are more likely to maintain a strong motivated workforce that is willing to expend extra effort, drive business goals, and deliver a return on HR’s talent management investment.” Given the connection between transparence and employee engagement, organizational decision-makers can take the following steps:

Assess the change leaders. A first step in building a culture where transparence is a standard practice, is to assess leaders at all levels to determine if they are ready, willing and capable of transparence. If not, they can be given the opportunity to course correct, but if the reality is they are not equipped to bring about the change necessary, there needs to be an appetite to release those who don’t fit or show interest in fitting in an transparent culture.

Update your internal communication strategy. The next step is to review the internal communication channels and their effectiveness. Effectiveness encompasses the content of the message, the timing, targeting and frequency of information dissemination. If the channels are not facilitating information flow in multiple directions then you can use your research to determine the priority obstacles that need to be removed.

It is also appropriate to review your communication modalities and their effectiveness. Meetings, newsletters, and engagement surveys are all possible tools for facilitating multi-directional communication. If they are ineffective, decision makers should ensure the necessary changes are made.

Walk your talk. Decision-makers are the architects of transparence. In order to hold employees accountable to transparence decision-makers should model transparent behaviors consistently.

Repair relationships. Relationships are the connective infrastructure that supports transparence. As part of the relationship building exercise, employees can be provided developmental opportunities designed to build their emotional intelligence and other competencies related to transparence. This is vital because everyone is responsible for transparence.

Explain decisions. Explaining why you or other decision-makers made a decision opens you up to being challenged and allows you to improve a solution that was informed by limited perspectives. It can also contribute to reduce levels of gossip after an announcement. Therefore, self-esteem issues that interfere with your ability to be open to contradicting insights need to be faced and transformed, where possible.

Find out what employees need & advocate for them. This is how you build trust. Listening to employees, and using their suggestions helps them feel they are a part of the team. The leader of the team can only achieve this if he has healthy self-esteem that allows him to acknowledge the ideas and views of others.

Low self-esteem is not the only cause of low transparence levels; fear and greed are also possible driving forces. Building your emotional intelligence skills allow you to identify your emotions, recognize your patterns, navigate the emotions behind those patterns and understand the full scope of the consequences of your patterns. These skills help you to build relationships and more importantly, trust, which is an important building block for engagement.

Transparence is present when there is authenticity and it is this authenticity that contributes to trust. Author Jason Silva, a television personality and keynote speaker suggests an introspective approach to changing your behavior in his statement, “Look at the evidence and be willing to question your own truths, be willing to scrutinize things that you hold dearly because that way, that transparency, that self-awareness, will protect you from ever becoming somebody whose beliefs somehow make them have myopic vision about what could be.” This is because when leaders shift from a myopic view to the big picture, and care about the development of others, engagement levels can grow. Multiple studies make a direct connection between employee engagement and the performance of organizations so building a transparent culture can better position executive teams to exceed and sustain performance goals.