OD & Change Management Consultant (Human Capital Innovations); Professor, Woodbury School of Business (UVU), Social Impact & Innovation Guru.
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I recently started a new series exploring the five characteristics of highly impactful leaders, with the first three characteristics centered around practicing emotional agility, creating a clear meaning and purpose and authentically caring. Today, I'll be discussing another characteristic of highly impactful leaders: practicing openness and transparency.
Why Is Practicing Openness And Transparency An Essential In Leadership?
We have all experienced the frustration of being on the outside looking in, expected to implement directives from the "higher-ups" with no understanding as to the "why" behind the decision or the context surrounding how the decision was even made. When decisions are made behind closed doors and organizational leaders don't prioritize open communication, the rank-and-file of the organization tend to fill in the gaps in the available information — and even create the arguments and justifications for the "why" if none was provided to them. This kind of closed approach to leadership causes confusion, increases resistance to change, reduces trust and ultimately undermines efforts to generate employee buy-in and influence behavior.
In this day of instantaneous communication and dissemination of information across the internet and social media platforms, organizations and their leaders can't hoard information, and they can't afford to even be perceived as hiding or covering up key information that is pertinent to their people or the public. As stated in a recent Entrepreneur article, "Transparent leadership allows employees to be more honest about their individual viewpoints and more open about expressing them in a public dialogue. The more openness and honesty you facilitate in the context of your team, the faster you'll be able to work together to achieve a common end goal." Not only does a lack of openness and transparency have negative PR implications for organizations, but more importantly, it erodes an organization's and leader's trust and credibility. Without trust, you can't lead. Leaders who want to truly influence and impact those around them need to create and facilitate a transparent and open environment of communication flow and collaborative learning.
Here's How To Start Practicing Openness And Transparency Today
It is one thing to conceptually understand the importance of openness and transparency within an organizational setting; it is another thing entirely to become a person of integrity and to earn the trust of your people. Focus on the following to develop that trust and to practice genuine openness and transparency within your organization and with your team:
Focus On DEI&B: Part of creating a safe and open workplace environment and organizational culture is focusing on a genuine commitment to the organization's diversity, equity and inclusion culture and the supporting policies, practices and procedures to ensure fairness for all. As a leader, we need to be honest and open with our people about where we stand with our diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEI&B) efforts, where we are currently falling short and what we are doing to address the gaps.
Create A Speak-Up Culture: If we want to foster a culture of transparency and openness in our organization, we have to start by making it safe for our people to push back and challenge us. They need to see that their contributions and thinking are genuinely needed and valued, and they need reassurance that there won't be any retaliation against them when they speak up and speak out for the betterment of the team and the organization.
Listen To Understand: Once we create a safe environment where everyone can contribute and share their honest views, we need to actively listen to the diverse views of our people and make sure that they feel heard. While it is not expected that we directly act on every last piece of input from our team, we should make sure our people know their input matters and that it does help shape our decision-making.
Show Genuine Gratitude: Openness and transparency are not just about sharing policy information with your people. We also need to be open about the contributions of everyone in the organization. Everyone likes to be appreciated, and if we don't consistently show genuine gratitude for the input provided by our team and demonstrate how their input has helped shaped strategic decisions and organizational actions, the flow of contributions will likely slow to a trickle, and trust will suffer.
Build An Accountability Culture: If we believe openness and transparency are important to our leadership, we need to follow this up with an accountability culture. We need to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of personal integrity, and we need to hold our people accountable to the expectation of treating everyone within the organization with dignity and respect. When this occurs and everyone holds each other mutually accountable for the culture and outcomes of the organization, the natural byproduct will be even greater trust, transparency and openness.
Develop Institutional And Interpersonal Trust
Each of the previous tips has laid out some of the contributing factors to developing and sustaining institutional and interpersonal trust within your organization. Bottom line — if openness and transparency are important to you as a leader and to your organization, you need to make trust a top priority. Without genuine and authentic trust, we can openly share information all day long, and it won't do much good.
Conclusion
Everyone wants to be trusted and seen as a person of integrity. But we can't just assume that we will have the trust of our people because we find ourselves in a new leadership role. That trust has to be earned and maintained, and one of the best ways to do that is by being genuinely open and transparent with our people. As we focus on our DEI&B efforts, create a speak-up culture, listen to understand, show genuine gratitude and hold everyone accountable (including ourselves), we develop the needed institutional and interpersonal trust that is necessary to become a highly impactful leader.
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