Transparency is currency for your team
Why sharing more information with your employees matters
How much information do you share with your team? If you are an old-school leader who remains tight-lipped about your organization’s strategies and challenges, it may be time to rethink and adapt your management playbook.
Sharing information with your team will build trust, engagement and collaboration. This is especially true with younger employees who covet work-life balance and transparency. Paychecks and promotions aren’t their primary motivations, and they won’t stick around if they don’t like the workplace culture and feel like they can’t trust their leader.
Transparency is currency
Unsurprisingly, many senior leaders don’t share much information with their employees. That’s not how they did things when moving up the corporate ladder.
However, leaders should strive to overcome this to become more inclusive and transparent. Younger employees and those who’ve been around longer and embraced a new workplace ethos that is no longer as rigid and top-down want to know what's happening in their organization, why decisions are made, and how they can contribute to the bigger picture.
If you’re a more senior leader, it will probably feel like you’re sharing too much information or too frequently. But this new generation, firmly embedded in the workforce, is tech-savvy and now has knowledge at their fingertips. So, if you don’t share important news about the company, they will find out anyway, and you will lose trust and credibility.
The cost of not sharing information
In the absence of information, people make stuff up. It’s grounded in neuroscience. One of the models I use frequently is David Rock’s SCARF model, which is an acronym that stands for the five main domains that govern our behaviour. In this model, “C” stands for certainty.
As employees, we want and need a certain amount of information, things like:
What does success look like in my role?
How do my responsibilities influence the direction of the team and the organization?
What are my opportunities for growth and development?
Where are we succeeding or failing as a team/ an organization?
The absence of this essential information creates a stress response triggered by a lack of security.
When people make things up to fill in the missing information, it’s their way of trying to make meaning and protect themselves. The brain says we don’t know everything, so it automatically generates a worst-case scenario and flips into survival mode.
Imagine this: two strangers in nice suits walk into your office with your company’s CAO, who tours them around your workplace, talking and pointing.
Your manager didn’t say a word. The next day, it’s the same thing: two different people come in, looking around, pointing and talking. So, what do you start thinking and wondering about? What’s the watercooler talk?
Is the company for sale? Downsizing? Am I going to be laid off?
That’s where your brain goes instinctively. You wouldn’t naturally think “We’ve been working so hard that the company wants to outfit us with the best ergonomic office equipment and new computers.” Your brain doesn’t do that. We’re scanning for threats. An information-starved team will be anxious, and their creativity, performance, and engagement will suffer.
Building trust and boosting your business
We know that one of the things that all team members – especially the millennial generation – crave from leaders is transparency.
We’re seeing that everywhere: politics, entertainment, sports – where the story of a new-age coach who can communicate with the team’s younger players replacing the gruff disciplinarian has become a familiar narrative.
When we start to share information, it increases trust. Your team will feel safer going to you if they’ve got questions, concerns, or the next big idea that will change the company’s trajectory!
I understand it’s a significant shift for leaders. Most of us started our business careers under the old style of leadership, which was if I’m above you in the org chart, I’ll share information with you on a need-to-know basis, and all the ideas, decisions and directions come from above.
I encourage leaders to change this paradigm and err on the side of sharing more than what they’re comfortable with and being as open and honest with their teams as possible within reason. Some things must remain confidential, of course.
By doing this, your team’s leadership capacity will start to grow, and they will become more involved in problem-solving, analyzing information, collaborating and coming up with ideas, which will benefit your company in many ways.