The surprising road to better decisions: unconditional transparency

You are running a team. Or a project. You have one level of staff reporting to you. Or several. And clients / partners / providers. And you share information with them. Or withhold information. Because you have heard that "information is power". And you believed it. Or (hopefully) not.

If you are there, or have been there, wondering how much to share with the team, I would like to welcome you to the wonderful world of unconditional transparency.

Let me get it out there: you should share (almost) everything with (almost) everyone. There, I wrote it. Before I explain the why and how, let me explain the "almost" - you should share everything with everyone, unless:

• There is a legal / contractual / regulatory reason not to; non-disclosure agreements, anti-trust legislation, HR constraints are some of the cases where non-disclosure of specific pieces of information is mandatory.
• The information is closely related to the intellectual property of your organization and sharing it with people outside the organization's "circle of trust" could jeopardize critical assets.
• Sharing the information could potentially harm specific individuals.

These exceptions, generic as they might seem, fortunately apply only to a tiny part of the information we handle during our everyday work. How should we handle the vast majority of information that flows through our hands and is not filtered through the above cases? Well, share it. Here are some tips:

• Establish unconditional transparency as a team value and norm; promise to be fully transparent with everyone and ask your team members to commit to that as well.
• Explain up-front the exceptions to this rule as described above.
• Don't sugarcoat - always be polite and professional but give the facts as they are; I usually say to people up-front that "I can either be sweet or useful, it's extremely hard to be both at the same time"; surprisingly, most people will opt for useful.
• For every significant decision that you make, explain the rationale to the team and provide all relevant facts that led to the decision.
• Give full permission to the team to challenge your decisions based on facts; go one step further by following the McKinsey example of promoting this "permission to dissent" to an "obligation to dissent".
• Whenever you circulate a document to a select group of people, challenge yourself on why the rest of the team "does not need to know"; a typical example is the status reports we produce for the senior stakeholders of a project - unless there are sensitive information, why shouldn't we communicate to the whole team? Even if there are pieces of the report that are restricted (e.g. sensitive financials), why can't you share a sanitized version of the report?
• Always think "information asymmetry"; how can you ever expect to have meaningful problem solving and decision discussions with your team if you don't share the same fact base? A manager being "in the know" talking with a team being "in the dark" is an obvious recipe for disastrous group thinking.
• There is nothing indicating trust more than full transparency; people really appreciate the trust and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, react amazingly to it.

So, next time that you think "hold back information", think again. Instead, try switching your default posture to "share by default, only hold back when absolutely necessary" and good things will happen to you and your teams.