A Simple Guide to Leading Your Company with Transparency
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The document discusses the importance of transparency as a core company value, emphasizing its role in building trust, accountability, and alignment among stakeholders. It provides guidelines for achieving transparency while being mindful of potential distractions, advocating for open communication, consistency, context, and honesty. Leaders are warned that radical transparency can sometimes detract from building value, and transparency should ultimately serve to improve company performance and employee satisfaction.
A Simple Guide to Leading Your Company with Transparency
- 1. How to lead your company with transparency.
- 2. Transparency as a core value. Transparency as a core company value means being transparent with all stakeholders. This includes employees, customers, partners, vendors and the media. Often, this means being transparent about company goals, strategies and decisions. But in some cases this can also mean radical transparency for aspects of the business that would usually go carefully guarded such as customer churn, revenue, profitability, salary and more.
- 3. The benefits of transparency: ‣ Transparency builds trust, accountability, and alignment across all constituents of the company. Simply put: It’s good for company culture. ‣ Leading a company with transparency sounds modern and cool, and—all humor aside—sounding modern and cool helps with recruiting. Being modern and cool helps with retention. ‣ Transparency helps the broader business community. Companies like Buffer openly share their company-wide salaries while Bare Metrics shares reports and statistics on customer churn and monthly revenue at a variety of companies—big and small. Transparency with the public and the companies in your orbit helps to build a community atop a foundation of honesty. This is never a bad thing.
- 4. Transparency is key to building a thriving company culture, but companies and leaders must learn how to achieve transparency without causing distraction or disruption.
- 5. Here are some simple guidelines for leading with transparency!
- 6. 1. Be open, but thoughtful. Share as much information as can be shared, that is not confidential, distracting or hurtful to any involved parties (the company, customers, staff, media, other key stakeholders, etc.); When considering what to share, ask: Does it benefit all parties? If the answer is no, it merits some careful consideration.
- 7. 2. Be consistent. ‣ Company roadmap, strategy, and goals. ‣ Company performance. ‣ Context on decision making; include staff in decision-making when relevant and realistic. ‣ Company strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Share this information with team members, often and consistently:
- 8. 3. Give context. When you share information, don’t just throw it out there and assume everyone will consume it, or understand it. Present data and information with as much context and background as you can to help ensure the information is received and processed. Information needs to be framed for it to be understood in context.
- 9. 4. Be honest. Answer questions honestly and directly. Even in situations where everything can’t be disclosed, it’s important to share what you can, and never give dishonest or inaccurate information. You may sometimes, depending on the situation, need to be vague in order to maintain confidentiality but you never need to be dishonest.
- 10. Can a company always be transparent? Yes! Every company needs to determine what level and style of transparency is right for their culture, but these guidelines are the minimum a company should do when it comes to transparency.
- 11. One final thought on transparency…
- 12. The danger of radical transparency: A leader’s job is to build value in their company. Sharing the ins and outs of every single aspect of the company—the good, the bad and the very ugly— won’t always align with the job of building value. The bad and the ugly can be distracting, and it can cause worry. The bad and the ugly, with perspective, is just a molehill. Without proper perspective, it becomes a mountain.
- 13. Transparency is a means, not an end. Your goal as a leader is to better your company’s performance and to improve the lives of your employees. For transparency to help in achieving this, it must serve these twin goals. See to it that your style of transparency does exactly that, and does not breed discord and resentment in the workplace.
- 14. Inspired by… Want more? These slides were inspired by “How to Lead Your Company With Transparency” on the Married2Growth blog.
- 15. Thank you! We hope this was helpful, and we’d love to hear from you! info@married2growth.com
- 16. THE BUSINESS OF SaaS