Leading in the Age of Exploding Transparency

Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 324

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Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 324 | November 24-30 2023

Leading in the Age of Exploding Transparency

By Melissa Swift | MIT Sloan Management Review | November 29, 2023

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Goodbye Watercooler Grumbling; Hello QuitTok.  Knowledge is power — and today, everyone seems to have it.  Unfortunately, greater availability of information on workforce issues like pay, layoffs, or diversity, as well as business performance metrics at the micro and macro scales, means that the average worker is getting hit with more bad, or at least uncomfortable, news. For leaders and employees alike, this is prompting tough conversations that create a meaningful source of stress: even the most seasoned leaders often struggle to engage in these challenging conversations, causing both parties to walk away more unsettled than when they started.

So how can leaders stay sane — and effective — in a world where it can feel like everyone knows everything and talks about it all of the time? What can organizations do to ensure that appropriate signals pop through a cacophony of noise, and that the noise doesn’t challenge the well-being of everyone they employ, from the top down?  Four pathways to sanity and clarity in a hyper-transparent world.

1. Ease leaders’ burden by dialing up the right kind of organizational honesty.  If people will see the reality of a given situation anyway, communicating about that reality from the jump means that individual leaders won’t have to scramble and backpedal when confronted by their teams.  
2. Reframe communications on a “one world” basis — ending the internal/external distinction. It’s often said that we live in a world of context collapse, where information travels instantly through seemingly disparate circles of communication that would have been disconnected or at least time-sequenced in the past.  To address this changed reality, many organizations have merged internal and external communications functions, or have tasked heretofore externally focused communications departments with ensuring consistency in messaging to internal stakeholders as well.
3. Go “back to the future” on basic communication skills — but add 21st-century emotional intelligence. Although the hyper-transparent world is the outgrowth of a host of quickly evolving technologies, the ultimate leadership superpower in this context is a distinctly low-tech one: being able to speak or write a simple, clear sentence. Like a bell cutting through the chatter in a crowded town square, leaders with excellent basic communication skills are simply better at making themselves heard through the noise. All of that said, being factual and logical isn’t enough on its own. Neuroscience findings caution us that separating rational and emotional thinking is a false dichotomy altogether, and thus, we should stop trying to craft completely emotionless leadership messages.
4. Build your judgment muscle — and your team’s. Let’s take as a given that the transparent nature of the world and workplace will only increase from here on out. In such an environment, your ability to quickly and sensibly decide what to do with a piece of information — your judgment — becomes a critical tool for survival and success and they need to get better at judgment. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Goodbye Watercooler Grumbling; Hello QuitTok.  Knowledge is power — and today, everyone seems to have it.  Unfortunately, greater availability of information on workforce issues like pay, layoffs, or diversity, as well as business performance metrics at the micro and macro scales, means that the average worker is getting hit with more bad, or at least uncomfortable, news. 
2. For leaders and employees alike, this is prompting tough conversations that create a meaningful source of stress.
3. So how can leaders stay sane — and effective — in a world where it can feel like everyone knows everything and talks about it all of the time?  Four pathways to sanity and clarity in a hyper-transparent world:  ease leaders’ burden by dialing up the right kind of organizational honesty,  reframe communications on a “one world” basis — ending the internal/external distinction, go “back to the future” on basic communication skills — but add 21st-century emotional intelligence, and Build your judgment muscle — and your team’s.

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Topics:  Leadership, Communication Skills, Transparency, Honesty