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Leadership Truth #4 - Great Leaders Value Transparency

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: Transparency in an organization means not holding things back from people.In so many organizations people know there is information being denied them that they really ought to know. This is devastating to morale.

Leadership Truth #4 - Great Leaders Value Transparency

The shortest route to trust is paved with honesty. The best leaders understand that if they attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of people, it significantly reduces trust. There is too much spin in the world and much of it is where people are hiding the truth from the leader. Warren Bennis put it this way: "A universal problem is that when staff speak to their leader, the very nature of the message tends to change. The message is likely to be spun, softened, and colored in ways calculated to make it more acceptable to the person in power. In order to continue to receive reliable information, those in power must be aware that whatever they hear from their direct reports has probably been heavily edited, if only to make the message more palatable and to make the messenger appear more valuable."

Leaders who are obsessed with how things are rolled out in order to optimize the reactions are deceiving themselves. I don't mean to imply that information should be sent out haphazardly without a plan. Carefully adhering to the truth and reinforcing people who question what is happening is what I am advocating.

You undoubtedly know how it feels to be on the receiving end of a slick snow job put out by senior management to make a bad deal for employees look more palatable. You can smell the B.S. a mile away. The perpetrators are busy congratulating themselves on the coup of getting through the shareholder meeting with nary a question on the reduced benefits package. What they do not see is the overwhelming damage done in the minds of the silent majority of employees. Since the workers realize there is nothing to negotiate, they smile and nod on the outside, while they work hard to keep from barfing over the sheer hypocrisy. At lunch after the meeting, the CEO is happily telling his henchmen how great it is to work in such a flexible organization. As they sit in the tower dining room over a second cup of coffee, they actually believe they were telling the truth. Meanwhile in the break room off the shop floor, workers are making voodoo dolls out of the plastic spoons.

The above example is quite common, but it pales in comparison to the thousands of less egregious examples that go on every minute of every day at all levels. Imagine the damage that is being done to credibility. No wonder the trust level in the typical organization is hard to read on the credibility scale. Imagine the advantage that exists in that rare organization where transparency is highly valued by senior leadership.

There is an aspect of transparency that has shifted significantly in recent years. That is the role technology plays in the dissemination of information. With the emergence of blogs and social chatrooms, all information can be quickly disseminated. There is no longer a cloak of secrecy on the inner workings of leaders in organizations. Warren Bennis puts it this way:

Despite the promise of transparency on so many lips, we often have the sinking feeling that we are not being told all that we need to know or have the right to know. But at the same time, a countervailing force is making transparency less dependent on the will of the leaders. The digital revolution has made transparency inevitable worldwide. The Internet, camera-equipped cell phones, and the emergence of the blogosphere have democratized power, shifting it away from the high-profile few to the technologically-equipped many.

It is incumbent on all leaders to strive for full disclosure themselves rather than trying to avoid being discovered by a horde of titillated bloggers. Smart leaders see the value of transparency and seek to maximize it at all times.

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Article Tags: honesty, Leadership, technology, Transparency, Trust, Values, vision



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