Transparency

Keeping secrets from your competition makes sense. Keeping secrets from your employees makes problems. Keeping secrets from your creative employees makes for some drama. And that's not good at all.

As a leader you need to be open about what you're doing. With few exceptions, the time for secrets is over. Forgot the passive aggressive manipulation, forget playing Jack off of Jill, forget your plans for total world domination...you've got a business to run and all of that, ALL of it, simply slows down your progress. Leaders who play a game of "I've got a secret" lead their people into trouble. Trying to do things in secret really explodes in your face once people find out what you're doing...and they will.

In my last government position I was in what was supposed to be the creative cell within a larger bureaucratic body. Our division was called Strategic Plans and Initiatives...the acronym, of course, was SPI. When I saw the devilish grins on my boss and some of my co-workers I knew we were in trouble. "ooooh," they said, "we're the SPIs...quick, close the door!" They were very impressed with their perceived role in the world and were pretty sure we needed to be operating behind closed doors so other divisions wouldn't learn about what we were doing. Why we didn't want other divisions knowing what we were doing was never fully explained, but that set the tone for all of our daily activity.

Why is transparency so important for a leader? Well, first of all, you need to provide people a common focus. As we discussed before, your creative employees may well go off in completely different directions without some common goals, so setting your goals and keeping them to yourself isn't going to help. I had a government boss once who told me, "I don't see why people want plans to be written down...I already know in my head what it is I want to do." Yeah, that's not helping the rest of us, because we haven't been to mind-reading class yet. If you want your employees working together (and you DO), then they need the same information, and keeping plans and issues to yourself isn't going to help.

While it's true that everybody likes surprises, it's also true that nobody likes surprises. What I mean here is that everyone (well, except for grumpy people) likes opening a present on their birthday, but nobody likes opening a budget and seeing their resources got cut because of some priority they never heard of. People like to know what's going on and if they feel they're being cut out of things they're going to resent it professionally and personally. My SPI boss had someone working on a wiki-based information sharing system while the Research and Analysis division was working on integrating databases in a couple different agencies to try to achieve a similar result. But the wiki-work was being done in secret, even though the two efforts could have complemented each other, and because some good effort was divided, and everybody got mad when the "secret" project was revealed in the budget meetings, neither project ended up going anywhere. A bunch of drama in the workplace doesn't help, and that's exactly what you'll get from a creative bunch of folks who spend their time coming up with good ideas and hate seeing them wasted.

Yes, in many businesses you face inter-office politics, and that's usually the justification for a lack of transparency. But the impact that different groups in your organization will have on each other should lead to more transparency, not less. Chances are you need to get buy-in from other divisions to encourage cooperation and reduce friction in budget plans and such. Maybe your employees' work is only going to matter if it's done in conjunction with others, and so you need cooperation rather than competition. Try to overcome the problem of politics rather than feeding it.

Having said all of this, there ARE some things you need to keep quiet. Personnel matters, for instance...not everyone needs to know who's making how much money or which employee has only 3 weeks to show some improvement before being let go (THAT employee needs to know, but you shouldn't broadcast it to everyone). Private matters and problems at home shouldn't be advertised...if you know one of your folks is having trouble at home and it's going to affect their work, find another way to explain that impact in the office without giving all the private details of your employee's life. Remember, "transparency" is not the same as "feeding the gossip machine."

If the reason you limit transparency in the office is because you don't trust your employees -- maybe you're concerned they'll go to a competitor, or perhaps use the information to take your job and get ahead -- that's a sign of a bigger problem. Why do you have people working for you whom you don't trust? If you really and truly don't trust your employees and peers, then the best thing to do is to go elsewhere, because this is a company destined for BIG problems.