Trust is as important in business as it is in everyday life, especially within the same company. Coworkers need to be able to trust each other to collaborate effectively. The same goes for the amount of trust between different departments or levels of an organization.
As one of the building blocks of trust, transparency is an especially important trait to nurture, both in yourself and all your employees. Let’s have a closer look at how transparency facilitates the trust, and how you can encourage it within your organization:
Benefits of Transparency
A work environment where openness is encouraged and nurtured helps to keep the employees satisfied. While building trust, you’re working at benefiting your organization in other ways at the same time. You’re improving communication, increasing accountability, and facilitating better teamwork across the board. What’s more, this process promotes the establishing of helpful feedback loops which ensure employees can trust that they will be heard and acknowledged.
Different Types of Transparency
It’s possible for an organization leader to be good at some types of transparency while being completely shut off in other areas. There are a few different types of openness to look out for within an organization:
- Transparency in intentions – stating your organization’s goals and plans clearly and making this knowledge accessible to all employees, so that they can be accountable and wholly aligned to the organizational goals;
- Transparency in finances – ensuring that all financial information that can be freely shared with employees is shared, such as monthly, quarterly and yearly statistics and budgets. This helps everyone in the organization see how their work impacts the organization’s bottom line;
- Transparency in accountability – making sure that everyone in the organization is clear about their accountability, and is assigned the necessary authority to perform their duties, and that they know what the expectations are of them at any given time;
- Transparency in emotions – ensuring that effective communication is possible by creating an environment where everyone in the organization can speak their mind, provide feedback and receive it freely so that all the potential issues are recognized and addressed early on.
The Damage of Spinning the Truth
Unfortunately, many organizations tend to fall into the trap of doublespeak and cleverly spinning the truth. It is harmful because deducing what is hiding behind the doublespeak and spin can be all too easy, yet still lead to confusion and a toxic work environment.
If you hide certain statements behind a veil that lets you avoid the truth, the employees will inevitably get the sense that they aren’t trusted, which will, in turn, deteriorate their faith in the organization. And when this unwanted practice creates confusion, the problems that the organization faces include duplicating work, role confusion and a general drop in performance.
Key Takeaways
Maximum transparency in organizations is, unfortunately, a rare sight, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Encourage a culture of openness in your organization, and it will be much easier to start implementing beneficial management methodologies like the Effective Point of Accountability, which has the potential to improve the efficiency of your organization significantly.
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