As a technology leader, I always strive to be transparent in my leadership and decision-making. Transparency ensures that no decision comes as a surprise, that the intelligent and experienced people in my organization improve the quality of our strategy, and new initiatives can hit the ground running. But most importantly: trust and engagement thrive with radical transparency, resulting in a significant boost in output.
But transparency doesn't come naturally to many of us. By default it seems easier to communicate only when things are done, and to only those who can be trusted with the this information.
In this article, I'll (1) share my perspective on the natural hesitance towards openness, (2) define radical transparency is, (3) share how I've experienced it as fundamental to building trust and engagement, and (3) share tactics that I use to improve transparency in my organization.
Why the secrecy?
So why do leaders default to secrecy in the first place? From the team's perspective, secrecy (or 'confidentiality') can feel like a lack of trust. It may seem like leadership thinks the team can’t handle the truth or, worse, doesn’t respect their abilities. Secrecy can also fuel a sense of conspiracy—what are they hiding? Why aren't they sharing this? In some cases, it leads to the belief that management simply doesn’t know what they’re doing. This creates frustration, confusion, and disengagement. So why do leaders choose this strategy?
Flawlessness: Leaders want to inspire, lead, motivate, and instill confidence in the future. There is a belief among some leaders that they must project unwavering confidence, expertise, and success. The thought is: "if I don't show flawlessness, how can I expect anything from my people?" In this mindset, admitting to mistakes or uncertainty will undermine their authority and confidence in their policy. These leaders prefer to stay silent rather than losing out—ironically leading to the opposite effect of what is desired.
Completeness: The desire to show only completed work comes natural to most of us. E.g. a software engineer might want their code to be reviewed only when it's 100% bug-free, or a product owner will only share the ideas when they're confident that it will be accepted. Likewise, people in leadership positions may feel that sharing incomplete work will lead to confusion or unnecessary critique. Perhaps exposing early drafts or tentative plans will make them seem unprepared. Moreover, it will raise questions that would have been answered if they had just finished their research and reports. This pressure leads them to withhold information until it's done—even though this secrecy prevents getting valuable and often vital input from the professionals in the department.
Confidence: Some leaders may want to prevent fear or anxiety that could spread after sharing bad news, unpopular plans, or uncertainty. Sharing bad news is never easy, and leaders might hope to contain reactions by waiting for the right moment. But information cannot be contained, so silence leads to gossip and distrust.
Knowledge is power: Let's face it: some people in leadership positions do have corrupt motivation for secrecy. They may feel incompetence in their role. Knowing that knowledge is power, they play the political game and hoard information. These people are bosses, not leaders. But all hope is not lost. If they decide to trust their people and open up, then their trust will be returned and these leaders can start leveraging the power of their people rather than fearing it.
What is Radical Transparency?
Radical transparency is a leadership and organizational approach where all information is shared openly, candidly, and frequently, fostering a culture of honesty and trust. When an organization is a collection of smart and experienced people, the only way to make good use of all that brainpower is to feed people with information to benefit from their intelligent behavior. Radical Transparency therefor offers competitive advantage over confidentiality.
The concept of Radical Transparency is commonly accredited to Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, Dalio extensively discusses the principles of radical transparency in his book Principles, where he advocates for open communication, feedback, and decision-making processes within organizations to build trust and efficiency.
Unlike traditional practices where decision-making, feedback, and strategic initiatives are often confined to leadership teams or select groups, radical transparency ensures that almost all relevant information—both good and bad—is accessible to everyone within the organization. The idea is that the more people know, the more they can contribute, take ownership, and feel a part of the company’s mission and progress.
The Characteristics of Radical Transparency
Open Communication: Radical transparency prioritizes communication across all levels of the organization. This means that leaders regularly share their plans, challenges, and decisions with the entire team—no filtering or withholding of information. Critical updates, like performance metrics, strategic pivots, setbacks, project milestones, and even sensitive details like financial results, are communicated openly. This ensures that employees are never left in the dark about the company's direction or the reasoning behind leadership decisions. When bad news is shared, employees know that nothing is being glazed over, hidden, or left in the dark. Such transparency creates trust, a shared sense of purpose and gives employees the ability to align their work with the organization’s broader goals.
Frequent and All-Directional feedback: Feedback is not constricted to an annual top-down event. Instead, it’s a continuous, open, and all-directional process. Leaders, peers, and even team members at all levels provide ongoing feedback. This allows individuals at all levels to have a real-time understanding of how they’re performing, where they’re excelling, and where they can improve. This fosters a culture of growth and agility, encouraging constant learning and adjustment, and curbs gossip. By offering frequent, all-directional feedback, organizations enable employees to make timely improvements and recognize their contributions throughout the year, rather than waiting for periodic evaluations.
Shared Decision-Making: Radical transparency promotes a more inclusive and collaborative decision-making process. Leaders actively seek input from a wide range of employees, not just a small inner circle. Key decisions are discussed publicly, with the pros and cons of different strategies laid out for all to see and to provide timely feedback on. This creates a sense of ownership and involvement, as employees are not just passive recipients of decisions—they are active participants in shaping the company’s future. This openness fosters a deeper connection to the company’s success and ensures that decisions are made with input from the people most affected by them. Vital to this approach is that employees feel both the liberty and responsibility to contribute to decision-making.
Visible Processes: Documentation, discussions, and even brainstorming sessions are conducted in public forums for everyone to observe. Leaders document their thought processes, discussions, and even preliminary ideas in public forums like open emails, shared digital workspaces (wiki / confluence), or public meetings. This visibility prevents the appearance of "backroom" deals, hidden agendas, or ivory towers, and it invites collaboration.
Accountability: Radically transparent leaders own their failures and setbacks. Instead of hiding mistakes, the organization uses them as learning opportunities. Leaders acknowledge when things go wrong, discuss what went wrong publicly, listen to suggestions, and then explain the corrective measures being taken. This humility fosters greater trust among employees, showing that perfection isn’t the expectation but improvement is.
The benefits of Radical Transparency
Radical transparency can transform an organization by fostering trust, collaboration, and engagement. When decisions are made openly, employees trust that there are no hidden agendas and feel more confident in leadership. This openness invites contributions from skilled professionals, improving decision-making by incorporating diverse perspectives. It also shows that leaders value their team's expertise, increasing engagement and a sense of appreciation.
Involving employees in decision-making builds support, even for tough choices, because they understand the context and challenges. Ultimately, radical transparency turns employees into active participants, driving deeper ownership, accountability, and innovation within the organization.
The Drawbacks of Radical Transparency
While radical transparency offers many benefits, it does come with potential drawbacks. Sharing every detail can lead to information overload, where employees are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data and decisions they are expected to process. Additionally, being too open about challenges or uncertainties may cause unnecessary anxiety or fear, especially if employees feel they must constantly react to shifting circumstances. Radical transparency can also slow down decision-making, as open discussions and feedback loops from all levels may introduce delays or create conflict when aligning diverse opinions. Lastly, this approach requires a high level of trust, maturity, and emotional resilience from everyone involved, which may not always be present across the organization.
Becoming Radically Transparent
If you're still enthusiastic, and want to try it out in your organization, here are some strategies and tactics I’ve found effective to support radical transparency.
Open Access to Information
Ensure that critical information is available to everyone in the organization. This includes performance data, project status reports, and strategic documentation.
Use tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Confluence to create shared spaces where updates, documents, and decisions are easily accessible to all employees.
Set up centralized dashboards that display key performance indicators and real-time project updates for complete visibility. Think of tools like Productive.io, geckoboard.com, tableau.com
Store strategic documents, meeting minutes, and reports in a searchable knowledge base, giving employees insight into the decision-making process. I'm recommending Confluence for this one again.
Continuous Feedback
Create open feedback channels that encourage feedback at all levels, helping feedback to be both given and received continuously.
Implement 360-degree feedback platforms like Lattice or Namely, where employees can give and receive feedback from peers, subordinates, and leaders.
Encourage informal, real-time feedback during regular meetings or through digital platforms like Slack, where teams can provide constructive input without waiting for formal review cycles.
Provide training in giving feedback, because some people find it difficult to give feedback in a constructive manner, or to take feedback as an opportunity to learn rather than criticism.
Meet with direct reports on a regular basis, and be clear about expectations, observations, and current performance. People appreciate the clarity and the help in their personal growth. If your organization requires formal year-end performance reviews, continuous feedback will prevent any surprises and conflict and enables people to get the best out of themselves.
Collaborative Writing and Collective Decision-making
When developing key documents like departmental strategies, actively involve the team. Whenever I start with a new department or team, I like to write a department strategy. The first step I take is to create a new confluence page, tell people what I'm working, and encourage them to read, comment, edit. This collective approach results in a far better mission, vision, strategy, and it encourages ownership to the purpose.
Use collaboration tools like Google Docs, Notion, or Confluence to write documents, reports, discussions, brainstorming sessions, and decisions. Share these openly so everyone can see the thought process behind strategic moves. Invite people to share questions, comments, and feedback in open forums.
Make sure decision-making processes are visible by documenting both the rationale behind major choices and the discussions that led to them.
Encourage teams to openly share their workflows, making it easier for other teams to learn, contribute, or offer feedback.
Frequent, Transparent Updates and Discussions
Provide regular updates on progress, including successes, challenges, and setbacks, to ensure that everyone stays aligned with the organization's direction.
Use project management tools like Jira, Asana, or Trello to track progress and share project updates with the entire organization in real-time.
Send out regular updates summarizing organization performance, strategic pivots, or challenges, with an emphasis on honesty and transparency.
Hold regular open-office, or ask-me-anything sessions. These are informal yet highly effective ways for team members to raise concerns, ask questions, or test ideas. In my experience, these sessions can break down barriers, creating a safe environment for open dialogue.
Don’t underestimate the value of informal conversations. Test ideas in casual settings like coffee breaks before formalizing them. It’s amazing how much insight can come from a simple chat.
Be transparent about why you’re sharing incomplete information or unfinalized decisions. This could involve explaining timelines and what’s expected of the team in the interim. Setting expectations creates clarity, even when answers aren’t fully ready.
Accountability
Be transparent about failures and setbacks, using them as learning opportunities instead of hiding them. In times of crisis, major or minor, candidly inform the people in the organization and listen to concerns.
Hold ad hoc group meetings to inform and listen.
Conduct post-project retrospectives where teams can discuss both successes and failures. Document the lessons learned and share them broadly across the company so others can benefit.
Cultivate a culture where risk-taking is encouraged and failure is seen as a step toward growth, ensuring employees feel safe discussing challenges openly. Celebrate specific individuals for their successes, and take the blame for you department's failures.
Setting Boundaries
Even with radical transparency, there are essential boundaries to consider. Some information must remain confidential, such as:
Private or Personal Information: This includes individual leave details, personal performance management, or any private matters that shouldn’t be broadcasted.
Strategic and Competitive Information: Sensitive financials, market strategies, or competitive tactics that could give away critical advantages must remain on a need-to-know basis.
Transparency doesn’t mean recklessness. It’s about being intentional with what you share and ensuring it benefits the collective without compromising personal or competitive security.
Embrace the Uncomfortable
Radical transparency may be uncomfortable at times, especially when sharing imperfect information or admitting mistakes. But it is this discomfort that drives trust and engagement. When you’re open about your challenges, your team can step in to support, offer insights, and take ownership.
By embedding radical transparency into your organization, you create a culture where trust thrives, engagement increases, and productivity soars.
I'm keen to hear what other strategies you may have applied, or what your experience is with radical transparency. Reach out or leave a comment!
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