A lack of transparency in leadership can severely erode trust and morale and in turn, reduce productivity along with many other negative consequences. Over time, a continuing lack of leadership transparency can create a toxic work culture from secrecy. This kind of work culture stifles innovation and collaboration, further stalling or derailing organizational success.
Methods to Improve Transparency
- Establish clear and consistent communication channels with regular updates and town-hall-style meetings. These allow everyone to stay informed about the organizational mission and prepare them to implement and execute the efforts for organizational success.
- Radically encourage feedback and participation. Create consistent opportunities for employees to participate and be involved in decisions that affect them.
- Move away from outdated chains of command and replace them with true open-door policies. This sets the foundation for employees to approach their leaders with concerns and further enables them to fully contribute their repertoire of talent.
- Ensure all deliverables, deadlines and performance metrics are visible for all.
- Model transparency: admit mistakes, invite everyone to the decision-making table and operate in human-centricity. See the success story below for this principle in action.
Some Reflection Prompts
- How have you recently communicated your open-door policy and have employees capitalized?
- How often do you check in with your employees?
- When was the last time you asked your employees to provide feedback on your own performance?
Success Story
A leadership team member at one of our current client firms in the industrial production sector with a multicultural employee base was struggling to increase communication across teams. They initially thought it was a cultural gap and had made efforts to improve cultural awareness across the organization, but it was ineffective.
Recalibrating their efforts, they decided to host small group sessions with a sampling of employees from each department to determine the root cause of the issue. What they discovered is that it was not a cultural gap at all, but rather employees choosing not to communicate because they didn’t think what they had to say mattered since they were never asked for their thoughts or input. Leaders had made all the decisions that affected them without their lens on the given situation.
This troubled leaders as it was a sign that employees were disengaged. Since this discovery, the organization holds roundtable events for current issues on a weekly basis. The result: an engaged workforce, higher levels of production and innovative ideas that have increased the overall organizational performance.
The Takeaway
Production effectiveness is a natural product of an engaged, mobilized workforce led by human-centric, transparent leadership.
