Intentional Power

7Be Transparent: It's the Foundation of Trust

Transparency is often one of the biggest stumbling blocks for leaders as they shift from a traditional to a modern approach to leadership. We get it. What to share and how much is an ongoing challenge. Take this example: We worked for nearly a year with a fast‐growing start‐up company whose CEO was committed to building a high performing, highly inclusive culture. We helped our client develop programs, policies, and practices to lay the foundation for success as they ramped up and grew. A key initiative we worked on was helping the client uplevel their people analytics process and systems. One of the goals was to enable the company to be able to track hiring, retention, and promotion of diverse talent. A year in and the company had robust data to share, but when it came to sharing the data, the CEO balked.

He fretted that “if we give our employees some information, they'll want more and more.” Even though the employee demographic data was on par with the industry, he worried his company would be criticized as he had seen happen to larger, more established companies such as Google and Meta when they shared their data. At the root of it all was a lack of clarity on why transparency mattered. He said, “My job as the CEO is to deliver business results. Of course, I want to do that by creating a winning, inclusive culture, but what does transparency have to do with it?” We shared that transparency:

Builds Employee Trust

Research has ...