Think about a company where you can find all the information you are looking for. Everything is written and accessible—from detailed analysis of company financials to notes from the board meetings, from all details of projects to who is doing what at any moment. It looks like a utopia. Why can’t many organizations even get close?
People cannot figure out what level of transparency they should provide others. Leaders, in particular, keep certain information to themselves, sometimes with good intentions, like protecting someone else’s privacy, but more often, they can’t control their egos. When they receive feedback that says they need more transparency, they struggle to understand what that means.
Many leaders think transparency is something unattainable. You will also hear many of them saying, “We’re as transparent as we can be,” although they are far from it. Many claim that company financials are available to anyone, thinking that brings transparency. However, most of the day-to-day information cascades privately, relying on people’s preferences to share the information with others. People, beaten by their egos, don’t make every information publicly available because it might put someone (or themselves) in a difficult position.
Sometimes, leaders want to control the decision-making process. They manage access to information, form groups and invite others as they see fit. As they try to influence or balance a group of people, uninvited access to information might jeopardize the group dynamics and cause problems.
Actually, many leaders get the idea of decision-making wrong. Leadership is about decisions, but not always making them. Leaders must work toward helping the whole organization make better decisions quickly. One way to do that is to lead the team by giving them full context.
The team, which must make certain decisions to progress, must be able to access the context, content and all the information it needs without waiting for someone to make that information available to them. Leaders must provide context to their teams and let the team of experts make a decision. Leaders should work toward creating—what Brie calls—content-level transparency.
Brie divides transparency into two categories: structural and content-level transparency. Structural transparency refers to information shared freely and openly across the organization, while content-level transparency refers to insights into the raw work as it happens.
Many people think only of structural transparency, but what they need is content-level transparency. Anyone in the company can follow up on the work without asking anyone for any information. If someone else needs information about a project, they can search the open conversation and catch up with the information by themselves instead of someone sharing information personally.
Although content-level transparency is a great approach, many organizations fail in this area. They manage information flow within hierarchical lines or social dynamics, which causes stress. People who cannot progress efficiently in their jobs also suffer from stress. Leaders (and managers) become bottlenecks of progress and cannot effectively delegate to their teams.
However, delegation is the main enabler of growth in a leadership career. pThe more effectively a leader can delegate a job](/how-to-delegate-anything-successfully/), the easier their lives will be. Successful delegation demands full transparency, so leaders must share all relevant information.
Contextual transparency is one of the main enablers of successful leadership. Any leader who wants to empower their teams and grow their impact must make context accessible so they can answer questions before they arise while allowing people to ask more.
Content-level transparency has cumulative benefits: People spend less time building trust (which happens naturally in the process), politics are reduced, collaboration focuses on creative pursuits instead of knowledge sharing, everyone stays honest, and people can freely observe what/how others are working.
It also helps leaders and prevents them from becoming bottlenecks of information. Instead of carrying information up and down and to the sides, they can focus on more critical problems.
If your organization lacks content-level transparency, start implementing it by sharing the context of all the work with the people who need it and bringing them into where the discussions are happening. If you are leading a project, instead of creating a private chat group, default to a public one. Don’t worry about spamming people with unnecessary conversations. If they feel spammed, they will leave the chat.
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