I have read and re-read the bible on Transparency. On page 42 of Transparency, authors Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman and James O’Toole state, “Transparency is one evidence of an organization’s moral health.” Are these familiar names? If you lead an organization, they should be.
So what is transparency? Transparency is a choice, a value in an organization that optimizes candor (telling the truth regardless of the impact of that truth, fast and forward). These authors assert that candor maximizes the probability of success.
Transparency has to be lived as a value from the top of the organization down through its toes, where it does the walking. And it either walks its talk or it doesn’t. Like pregnancy, there is no such thing as being partly transparent. What would that be? We’ll tell you the truth part of the time but not all of the time? It’s up to you to guess which part is true, though.
Like humanity, this is a complex subject in application. We have seen the absence of transparency in highly visible cases where leaders did not intend to dupe their stakeholders, reality just got away from them at Enron, British Petroleum (BP) and most of the global organizational financial failures that created our drop in economic safety in the world. Reality was known in these cases, it was not transparent to those who could make a difference before the crisis.
Does transparency occur differently inside an organization with the lightening speed of the digital era, where things said cannot be retracted? The magnitude of emails and sometimes-careless comments and thought, can complicate discerning transparency for actionable matters.
These authors assert that transparency begins at home, in your own organization, where you will build a muscle around being transparent so that when called for in the world at large, you won’t be left without capacity for it like BP’s ex-CEO Tony Hayward, who eventually got around to admitting BP was not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.” They also call for leaders to empower transparency in both directions — enabling others to “speak truth to power.”
You do know what I mean. And if you have built a muscle around screwing your courage to the sticking point to look into the mirror, and if you enable your people to show you a mirror, good for you! If you have not, there is no time like the present.
Tell me your stories, your questions, your thoughts.
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