In this episode of the Future of Team podcast, hosts James Giroux and Dee Teal delve into the concept of transparent leadership. They discuss its definition, its role in fostering trust, and its impact on team performance. They highlight the importance of vulnerability, information sharing, decision visibility, and shared accountability in creating a culture of transparency. Tune in to hear them explore whether it’s possible to be too transparent, the balance required in communication, and practical steps for leaders to implement transparent practices for building high-trust, high-performance teams.
Transcript
James: Well, hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the future of team podcast. My name is James Giroux and I am joined this week again, as always by the lovely, the fabulous Dee Teal all the way from Melbourne, Australia. Hi Dee.
Dee: Hello. Hello. Nice to see ya.
James: We were just joking around that we often have a podcast before the podcast because we look at these topics and we start, you know, discussing what we’re going to talk about and, you know, what, what the flavor of the episode is going to be.
And then we have to go and record everything we just said all over again. And you may be wondering why I’m giving you a little inside scoop into you know, we’re behind the scenes of, of how the planning goes, but that’s because this week we are talking about transparency and transparent leadership.
So that was a little insight. that hopefully helps you better understand. And I don’t know, maybe it’s a perfect segue. That was a
Dee: very tight, very tidy segue, I thought. I see where he’s going with this. I’m super impressed. It’s like you’ve done this before.
James: Very smooth. Well, so transparent leadership. Okay, so this is a term I think that is out there. There are lots of people talk about transparency. Lots of people talk about transparent leadership. Yep. We have a definition at future of team for what that is. D, I’m not sure if you have any thoughts on it or maybe like a, just a general sense of, of what you think of when, when you hear transparent leadership .
Dee: I feel like there’s two elements of it. There’s the element where a leadership is open about what’s going on, and you’re not constantly wondering what’s going on. There’s also this kind of, I feel like, the kind of, Other side of transparent leadership is this vulnerability where if people are being transparent, then there’s some risk attached to that and it makes people a little bit vulnerable.
So there’s also the sense for me where transparent leadership is also a little bit vulnerable, but there’s something so humanizing about that, that it makes it really attractive for me. But I think, I think there’s value in actually kind of going through the future and team definition of it. Because I think some of the things that I’m thinking about, it might get unpacked as we talk about that.
James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, transparent leadership. So the way we define it at future of team is it really is the practice of leaders being open and honest about the company’s operations, about the challenges that the company is facing and also the decision-making processes that happen in an organization.
So we’ll, we kind of look where we evaluate three specific things. So we’re looking at information sharing. You know, you’re not just broadcasting information, but you’re actually opening channels for meaningful two way communication decision visibility. So this is where maybe you are bringing everyone into the room to at least metaphorically maybe, and, and Helping your team see how decisions are made, not just making them.
And the third is shared accountability, which is where everyone understands who is accountable, who the stakeholders are, and who’s responsible for decision decisions that have been made or information and things like that. And when you have these clear expectations in place and consistent and performance tracking.
For example, on the shared accountability. It gives that collective sense of responsibility that makes open and transparent leadership possible. So that’s, that’s sort of the way we define it.
Dee: I love it because I think the thread that I see through all three of those elements is the collectiveness of it, the joint, the participatory nature of it.
Is that a word? It sounded like it wasn’t a word for a second. Yeah, that is a word. Okay. So, but that sense of, you know openness, anonysis, and two way communication visibility, but where it becomes collective. So because the, the, the kind of net gain from that is that you can make decisions together and that shared, like all three of those things are very much a case of we’re in this together rather than this hierarchical.
And, and I wonder, I mean, this is a question I guess for you. Do you think that hierarchical companies are by nature less, It’s transparent where it’s just managers just telling you how it’s going to go. I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought of that until I said that, but, but I can see those three threads or those three elements with that shared thread of, you know, it feels like the sense of everybody’s got their shoulder to the wheel and this kind of joint thing rather than we’re all just contributing to somebody else’s thing maybe.
I don’t know. What do you reckon?
James: I think you, I think you’re right. Like when, when we think of maybe the more traditional org chart model, right? You have layers of leadership and those layers of leadership often have meetings and make decisions behind closed doors. I mean that whole term, you know, behind closed doors, right?
Right. Decisions being made behind closed doors comes from that lack of transparency, that lack of visibility. And it’s very much a top down do what I tell you approach to, to work. Right. Yeah. And I think what’s, what we’re seeing in the future of work, the few, you know, the kinds of workplaces we all aspire to be creating and to be working in are ones where It’s not necessarily that hierarchy is flattened, but decision making is flattened in the sense that there’s more openness to multiple layers of an organization contributing to the decision-making because it actually leads to better decisions because more of the people closer to the action have access to the people that ultimately have authority and responsibility for the decisions that get made.
Dee: Mm hmm. That sounds like a segue into what are the benefits of transparent leadership and are there drawbacks to transparent leadership?
James: Well, today I think we wanted to really you know, not just talk about transparent leadership as a whole, but really its impact or its effects on team trust and performance.
So if we want to talk about benefits and drawbacks, I mean, let’s take a look at those. Yeah. You know, when it comes to team trust in particular I think you know, one of the things we talked about in our, our pre podcast podcast was the balancing of transparency and trust. And you had some really interesting thoughts on that.
Dee: I did. I’m thinking so all my first question around that, is it possible to be too transparent? But I kind of want to step back a little bit from that and go, because we talk about one of the big reasons that we would be this transparent is because it does build trust. The more and I think the comments that you made around.
When you don’t have, when you don’t have transparency, people are writing the story for themselves. Right. And so, so for me, when I’m sitting there going, if I have transparent leadership, I know what’s going on. I can feel confident. And, and what’s happening, I can feel confident that I know when things are going to affect me, I’ll be told about it and I’ll hear it about it.
And that escalates my trust in the company and, and all in the leadership. And of course, by extension, the company that I’m, that I’m working in. So if the kind of net gain from a transparency is this escalation and trust, I think my next question was then, well, is it possible to be too transparent? So that’s.
That was kind of one of those first thoughts and yeah, I’m curious to know what you think about that. Can you be too transparent? Where is the line?
James: Yeah I actually have a really interesting story. So I used to live in beautiful Melbourne, Australia. And I worked for a company called Envato. And one of the roles I had there was as a, as the primary communicator of policy changes to the creator community of, of Envato’s marketplaces.
And so from time to time, we would have to articulate changes in policy or changes in pricing and different things like that. And and so we would do that. And we would always try to get in front of it as quickly as possible to give creators as much notice as possible. But one of the other things I got to do was travel around the world and meet with creators in person and hear their stories and talk to them.
And I always found it interesting. One of the first questions I would always get from these creators was, is everything okay? Like, is the business doing okay? Are sales going okay? Just generally, right? Like, is revenue okay? Because we like, we would communicate revenue every year. We would do the, this big public impact statement.
We would talk about how much, you know, we’d given to creators and different things like that. But for some, for whatever reason. There wasn’t enough transparency for our individual creators to feel confident that the platform they were making their, their livelihood on was going to be something sustainable.
It was, it was, it was like, it didn’t matter what corner of the ecosystem I went to, whether it was like WordPress themes or photographers or videographers or musicians. Everyone. was always in this perpetual state of tension about whether, you know, Envata was a month away from falling apart. And, you know, like, wow, different things.
And just to highlight your point there about the power of transparency, that you know, that’s a bit of an extreme case where I don’t think we could have ever been transparent enough unless we were posting daily revenue numbers for every single person in the world to be able to see. And even if we did that, they’d want to dissect it down to the individual line item, right?
And then they’d want to take a look at our expenses just to see, do you know what I mean? Like, like, Yeah. At some point there’s, there, there has to be a stop to your other point. Yeah. But, so that’s an extreme, but it just goes to show you on that side it was really important. But even inside the company, you know, for the first couple of years that I was there, we didn’t really do these big, you know, You know, revenue reports or, you know, we might have one a year where they would talk about, you know, the budget and, and how things were going and celebrating some milestones.
And then over time, they actually got better and better at doing those more regularly. And so we would have it at the department level where different departments would come up and they would share, you know, the goals that they’re, they’re working toward where they’re succeeding, where they’re not meeting the goal.
Right. And it’s not always revenue. But it was one of the really cool things about that was it allowed everyone in the company to share in the success of everyone else, understand the challenges of everyone else and see opportunities to contribute to support other teams where they might need it most in order to lift them up.
So yeah, can you be too transparent? I think so. Right. I think so too.
Dee: Yeah. I’m sitting here thinking through the kinds of things that would spill over from transparency, giving you confidence to transparency, taking away confidence. Right. And, and I don’t have a specific example from my experience, but I’m thinking through what it would feel like if a leader was, you know, Spilling their guts around Things that they’re super concerned about in their business without having a solid plan of how to resolve it Oh, you know revenues down.
This is all going to be terrible you know when you’re when you Kind of get caught up in the emotion of challenges around some of those things and you’ve built up a relationship with the team That they cut that you’re transparent with them But you also have to still be the leader to go, hang on, I need to know when I share my anxiety about where things are at and when I don’t.
So those are the kinds of things that I think would also feed into what am, what am I doing here that’s bringing confidence to the team. Yeah, that, that. I just had that moment where you kind of go, Oh God, that’d be scary when somebody comes in and goes, Oh, I’m having the worst day. And that’s his, you know, anyway, that’s an aside.
I think that’s
James: a good point. I think you can be too transparent when you present problems, but you don’t have, have anything sorted out on solutions or, or the path you’re going to take in the midst of those challenges or how you’re going to approach those. I think that’s, that’s probably a place where you are.
overcompensating on the transparency side, unless your goal is to seek additional input, right? Yeah. To help formulate a decision and you’re at that point where you just need that. Yeah. But that still communicates an action that people can take.
Dee: Well, that’s right. And it’s a maturity thing, right? I think there’s a maturity in how you and on how you communicate that or how you kind of process and work that through.
I think you said something in a pre podcast around the kind of circles that you share with. And I think that’s a really important thing of knowing, you know, to who you communicate. and what you communicate. And that, that, that has increasingly concentric is concentric contract. Anyway, it has the kind of the ripple effect of you share more, I was going to say vaguely, but you are, you probably share a lot more with the type five than you would pass with the, you know, with the hundreds.
Yeah.
James: Yeah, no we were talking about circles of trust and that, that concept I was, you know, what, For me, like we talk about team trust and performance as sort of like those two things for, for this week, but you need to be able to be open and transparent in your circle. And in order to do that, you need to have trust.
But in order to have trust, you need to have psychological safety. And in order to have psychological safety, you need to have a boundary. Around what will and will not be shared outside that circle, right?
Dee: Yeah
James: and and so you know There is tension there. It’s like You know, well, you know, I want to communicate What’s going on in my department or what’s going on in my team?
But i’m worried that if I overshare or if I get too Transparent that that could leak out and so and so could hear or that could have a negative impact on You know my Future performance or whatever, right? And so finding that balance of psychological safety, no, this is a safe space to share this stuff.
This is where you are supposed to, this is the appropriate place to share that. And recognizing that some of that, some of you, you, you’ve got to trust your team to communicate, you know, outside of that circle, what’s actually relevant, you know, often this can be a team lead. Who is in their management level meeting, right?
So it’s their first team. And so you’ve got team leads from four or five different teams and they’re all meeting together and they’re talking about what’s going on. The projects that they’re working on, the goals that they’re working toward, maybe the challenges they might talk about people challenges that they’re having.
Right, and that’s obviously not something you would want to have disclosed outside of that circle. They might be talking about for some you know challenges around the Approach they’re taking and not sure if it’s going to hit the goal or whatever it is, right? Or maybe there’s a decision That gets made in that group about how they have to pivot and shift because something from further up the chain has come down that they need to do.
Those are the kinds of things in my mind that are good to share and the reasons why, and all of the things around that can help the team. But yeah, there’s a judgment call there as well about what, what is and is not appropriate to share.
Dee: Yeah, I think about transparency in the context of change management as well, which is, you know, in these kind of volatile times that we’ve all been living in over the last couple of years, there’s, I, while I can’t think of specific examples off the top of my head, there’s been kind of numerous stories around how well or badly change has been communicated.
And I appreciate that in some situations change can happen quickly. And so the whole thing of being able to disseminate some of that information in a way that is more transparent and therefore somewhat more palatable is probably the ideal. I don’t think it always happens. I was trying to think, do I have a question around that?
But I think, I think some of the challenges that I’ve had in communicating change with team has often been around And having a time to be able to kind of process stuff personally before I’m trying to deliver that, but then to work it through with, with the people that are reporting to me and how you know, what the lay of the land looks like and then what the support is around kind of big changes, particularly when there’ve been things like layoffs going on.
Yeah. I don’t, I wonder if you have any thoughts around that and the balance of transparency and change. Sure. Managing big change.
James: You know, having been on the receiving end of change management, or change
Dee: yeah.
James: I think,
I think organizations that are transparent as a habit will have maybe Obstacles to change than organizations that don’t have transparency as a habit. When, when you are actively sharing information, right? And you are allowing multiple layers of an organization into decision making when there’s clarity around who’s responsible for what, That yeah, I
Dee: think that’s really valid
James: right those those pieces being in place make change Not as much of a surprise As in those organizations where Decisions are are held close to the chest where yeah, you know, it’s more of a surprise Here’s what’s happening And I’ve had both right where I’ve been in situations where, where, you know, the, the culture is very open and it’s transparent.
And then others where you walk in on a Monday to go to a team meeting and your name is on an agenda to present something that you didn’t know you were supposed to be presenting about, but you’ve got to get up and present on it. Right? Like that’s, that’s not transparent. That’s, that’s very much. Right. You know, gotchaism for lack of a better term.
And I think, I think that’s maybe, maybe part of it so that there maybe it’s, it’s like an inverse, right? That the, the less transparent an organization is, the more likely there is to be friction around change. Whereas the more open, the less friction you’ll have around change.
Dee: Yeah. I feel like that’s a whole other episode in change management, which is probably on, on our agenda somewhere down the line.
Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about the concept of transparent leadership, how it relates to trust. How does it relate to performance?
James: Oh, that’s a good one. And, and I’ve been scratching my, my head a little bit about how, how to articulate this, but I think what can often happen in organizations is the further away from the center you get, the blurrier the impact you have can feel.
And so it becomes a lot harder, a lot murkier when you’re an individual contributor sitting maybe at the outside edge of an organization. to be able to operate in a way that helps the organization to move further faster. And transparency and transparent leadership, in my opinion when, like, when we talk about information sharing and decision visibility and shared accountability, that is making it possible for folks who are at maybe the outer edge of an organization to be able to move more independently Around the the projects and the decisions that they have to make Because they have more information.
They have a better sense of where the organization is going They have a clarity around who to ask or who to get input and feedback from before they take those steps And so they’re not stuck waiting or they’re not sitting there like I would imagine and this has been my own experience that When you have when you’re empowered with the information You and you have clarity around the decisions.
It’s a lot easier for you to feel confident in the choices that you need to make in the work that you’re going to do, than if that information is hidden or if those decisions are out of, out of the, the, where you, where you would be. You’re not sitting around twiddling your thumbs and waiting for somebody to tell you what to do.
Dee: Well, I think the other thing that that, that transparency also kind of uncovers is what expectations are. And I think one of, one of the key, one of the key kind of mottos, well, not even mottos, but one of the key elements in my, the way that I kind of move through life and when I see things that are tense or when I see tension is what are the mismatched expectations.
that are here. And so if that, you know, a company and leadership has also been transparent about what the expectations that are, that they have on people that also kind of helps create that sense of, I know the shared direction that we’re going in. I think this is where things like OKRs or objectives and key results And key performance indicators, KPIs, come in, right?
Because they are, I, I’ve seen them implemented. I’ve seen some of the challenges around kind of implementing them. I have mixed feelings about using, but I understand that sense of they are a tool that are here to help kind of expose what those expectations are and give you some kind of sense of, are we meeting or not meeting.
Those expectations. So I can see the value from that perspective in terms of we’re trying to make this work visible. We’re trying to make that contribution contribution visible. And so I can see where they kind of have their benefit. And again, that feels like another podcast episode, but when people are asking in a kind of how do we make these things more transparent, I think those are some of the tools that can kind of take people into that space.
James: Well, have we reached any conclusions? In this, what do we think about the impact of transparent leadership and transparency on team trust and performance?
Dee: I think people need to know what’s going on. I think leaders need to be prepared to be transparent, but also circumspect around how they communicate that transparency and what they share and what they don’t share.
I think they need to be mindful of those. Circles of trust that you were talking about and kind of sharing appropriately. But I think the kind of key takeaway for me is transparent leadership is critical because it’s kind of that first step in building trust with the team and the people around you and building trust.
Or for me again, my, you know, kind of first value is you know, trust, you know, learned this and, and human made when I was working there, their first value is start with trust, or at least that’s the one that was always first for me. And so that’s seemed to be critical.
James: If you’re looking for a resource to help you out, our culture audit, audit, if you’re looking for a resource to help you out, our culture audit tool, it’s a free download, it’s a self assessment that you can do, and we ask you to evaluate.
Your transparent leadership score. And so we look at things like information sharing decision, visibility, and shared accountability. And so just to give you a little bit, I’m going to read some of this here from, from the audit to give you a sense. of what a top performing organization would look like if this is happening.
So a score of 7 to 10 in information sharing are reflects a high level of openness in sharing comprehensive information. including financials and strategic plans. Ensure this practice is maintained and continually refined. So that means that you are regularly having all hands. You are regularly communicating how you are doing financially, how you are doing, how you are working toward the goals that you have laid out either for the year or in your two year, three or five year plan.
You are making it clear to folks how things are progressing and And as soon as things change, you’re, you’re giving people an opportunity to hear about those changes and some of the reasoning behind it.
Dee: Yeah.
James: Decision visibility. So here you know a top or, or a well functioning, well performing organization demonstrates a high level of decision visibility.
So this ensures that that includes genuine opportunities for team discussion and consider ways to sustain this practice. And then for shared accountability top performing organization reflects well established accountability metrics that are regularly reviewed. So we talked about OKR as being a good example of that and continuously look for ways to enhance these practices.
So that’s just a little bit from the culture audit as a tool. Again, you can download from future of team. com, head over there and take a look. It’s free for, for anyone that wants to try it out. But yeah, I think the thing for me around decision that decision visibility one was interesting to like practically speaking, ensure there are genuine opportunities for team discussion, right?
That, that speaks to those levels of trust that we were talking about earlier. Yeah. But it also speaks to an openness. to allow other voices to inform your decisions. So maybe you’ve been working toward a decision and you’ve gathered a ton of information already and you’re on the cusp of making a decision.
I mean, this works really well at the team level where you have individual contributors and a team lead. So you’ve been gathering information. You’ve got what you think is the right direction and then you present that to the team Right? And you gather their input to make sure that everyone understands what’s going on and, and, you know, and say, my thinking is we’re going to make this decision.
Is there any one of the things that is maybe the wrong or have anything to add to this? And just get that input. And that’s a great, easy, simple, straightforward way. To make decision visibility, something that’s accessible to everyone.
Dee: Mm. Nice. Cool.
James: Well, on that note, why don’t we end it for this week?
Dee: I think it’s like plan as always, fab to tab to you.
I love this stuff.
James: Don’t forget to like subscribe, share, comment, tell us what you think. We we’d love to hear about that. On all the socials, wherever, wherever this is being broadcast. Thanks again. And we’ll see you next time. Yes, indeed. Ciao.
