Effective

Chapter 8Effectiveness Through Harnessing Transparency Properly

Let me take this moment to set the record straight: I did not rig the employee engagement awards.

Stop laughing! A few years ago, this was a real thing that I believed I was being accused of. And the whole tale of woe starts to give us some interesting insight into the challenges of working in today’s hyper-transparent workplaces—including how our own psychology can get tricky.

Before we get into why no one’s going to ask me to host the Oscars anytime soon, let’s talk about what it means for workplaces to be more transparent today than they have been for a while historically, and why that might affect your effectiveness. We’ve got a few things all going on at once:

• Data-driven organizations. Incredible effort has been spent over the last decades on better capturing key information, analyzing it, and making it more visible to more people inside companies.
• Changing regulation on pay transparency. In the United States, 14 states and Washington DC have now enacted laws requiring some sort of disclosure on what folks in particular roles actually earn.¹
• Social media. Company rating site Glassdoor, alone, reports 63 million unique visitors a month.² And that’s just one work-specific venue for discussion: of course, we talk about work on every other social media tool, from long, detailed discussions on Reddit to 15-second skits on TikTok.
• Internal communication tools. Who needs a watercooler when you have 15 zillion group ...