The Burden of Corporate Transparency
There is a burden one carries by knowing the truth ⟼ We carry that burden together
There is a burden one carries by knowing the truth ⟼ We carry that burden together
There he stood, face covered in chocolate, look of guilt enveloping his expression. My child had clearly just stolen a cupcake from the kitchen. “Son, did you just eat a cupcake?,” I asked. “No! I fell on a cupcake.” As any good parent would, I left the room for a second to laugh at his ingenuity and practice my sternest voice. When I returned, we had a nice long chat about lying and why it was bad.
I went to work the next day and discovered my boss had lied to me — not one of those “oh I forgot to tell you” kind of lies. A bold-faced, premeditated lie designed to avoid having a difficult conversation. And it was at that moment that I realized: we have become a society that teaches our children the Golden Rule, the moral of the story, the virtues by which they must abide. And then we turn around, go to work, and ignore everything we’ve preached.
Why have we become so accepting of lying and scheming in our professional lives?
There is literally no task in life that is made easier by having only part of the necessary information to complete it. If you bought a new gadget with incomplete assembly instructions, you’d probably tank the product on an Amazon review. Imagine choosing a college without knowing about the tuition fees or following a map that only includes North-South facing roads.
And yet, that is what we do every day in a traditional corporate structure. While most companies don’t maliciously lie to their employees, the vast majority do strategically withhold information. And that lack of transparency is a two-way street. When executives don’t conduct honest dialogue with their staff, they are deprived of the critical information to make decisions. Non-executives do not share critical insights about clients or tasks for fear of reprisal. Both groups end up resenting each other for not understanding their respective points of view.
I find that a lack of transparency is most often linked to a lack of trust. Executives fear that if they share all information that their employees will be less productive, quit, claim discrimination, or give that information to their competitors. Even gregarious leaders may think that full transparency would unduly burden the average worker with extraneous information that distracts from their roles. Conversely, non-executives fear that speaking the truth upward could cost them a promotion, political clout, or even their jobs.
But if every employee is integral to the success of the company, shouldn’t every employee share the burden of transparency and honesty?
Why should executives have to shoulder all of the stress of knowing the company isn’t doing well? If we fundamentally believe that the people we hire are good (because who ever hired someone they thought was untrustworthy?), then shouldn’t we treat them as such? This requires trusting them not just with good news, but with uncomfortable information as well.
Jean François Zobrist, former CEO of French manufacturer FAVI, is famous for instilling this ultimate transparency on his shop floors. During a revenue downturn in 1990, he had to cut costs quickly. Rather than formulating a layoff or pay cut behind closed doors and delivering the bad news at a company meeting, he shared the burden of truth with everyone. Literally climbing onto a soapbox, he explained the predicament to the staff. The staff then did something amazing -- they volunteered a temporary pay cut that sustained the company until revenue rebounded. And the beautiful part? Because they were informed and trusted with that information, they were happy to support the resulting decision. This probably wouldn’t have happened if the decision had been made top-down.