Leading & Communicating – How Open & Transparent Should You Be?
How open and transparent should you be at work – as a manager – to really get the best from your team? When does being open with team members go from building trust, relationships and teamwork … to being detrimental to your credibility, standing and authority?
If you play it safe and rarely reveal much about yourself, or your thoughts and opinions about what is happening within the company, or provide honest feedback – you don’t build trust, you don’t demonstrate open honest, communication and you rarely get better performance from your team overall.
Go too far and reveal too much and your team could easily lose respect for you, your credibility and authority take a serious knock AND your bosses are likely to be pretty unhappy with you too. Not a great recipe for a long and successful career in management.
Leading & Communicating – How Open & Transparent Should You Be?
- What makes great teamwork and why openness is a vital ingredient
- Demonstrating authenticity – what to share and what not to share
- How open and honest to make your feedback
- 7 questions to ask to be open and transparent with the right communications
Get the right level of openness and transparency and you start building trust, motivation, relationships and teamwork within days. Within months you can have a great team delivering impressive results while still being a fun place to work. On top of this, you will be trusted and respected by your bosses.
Getting to a good balance between revealing too much and too little is, unfortunately, not a formula. A few examples. The more decision making and solution building your team members do, the more open you need to be, to a point. Push for higher the team performance, the more open you should be, to a point. The more change, uncertainty and job insecurity, the more open you should be with your team, to a point.
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1 – What makes great teamwork and why openness is a vital ingredient
There is lot that goes into great teamwork. 6 crucial behaviours of strong teams:
- High levels of trust
- A lot of open and honest communication, which include lots of praise and feedback
- Good understanding of team members strengths and interests
- Appreciation of what each team does and how they contribute to team results
- An enjoyment of working together, of collaborating, of discussing problems and building solutions
- A willingness to proactively help team members
If team members are not open and transparent with for example
- what they are working on,
- when they are struggling,
- when they have good ideas,
- if and when they don’t agree with a solution or
- when they appreciate other team members
– then how are they going to build trusting relationships, communicate, co-ordinate, collaborate and work towards common goals?
The more open and honest team members are with each other in a supportive and team focused environment, the more likely teamwork will flourish. A team working together and playing to each person’s strengths will, in my experience, easily outperform a group of individuals working alongside each other.
Openness and transparency are vital ingredients of good teamwork and good team performance.
2 – demonstrating authenticity – what to share and what not to share when leading and creating great teamwork
Being authentic is necessary to build connections, trust and relationships with your team. The better your connections and relationships with your team the more they will share with you, the quicker you will get support and help, the easier they will be to influence and direct… in short, the easier it will be to lead them successfully. The more trust you build, the more psychologically safe your team will feel, which will in turn encourage and enable them to perform.
Being authentic when managing others is balancing creating connections and enabling team members to relate to you – with maintaining your credibility and authority as a manager.
You being authentic is not sharing everything. Being authentic is sharing relevant and considered parts of yourself. We all have different personas. Our work persona. Our out with friend’s persona. With our partner persona etc. Being authentic as a leader or manager is an extension of these personas. Choose what you are happy to share and share it honestly.
Part of being authentic is also revealing some weaknesses, fears and insecurities. Be careful what you reveal. Being human is expected and helps you create solid relationships with team members. Being overly insecure, needy, or unprofessional is not okay. For example, you could reveal your minor weaknesses but keep the major ones more hidden or their impact on doing your job well downplayed. Show you are aware of your strengths and weaknesses. Always remember – what you give the team on a self-management level should clearly outweigh what you need from the team.
Another important action is to admit some of your mistakes. Admit the smaller ones or the obvious ones rather than un-necessarily highlighting a lot of your mistakes. Again, what you do right must easily outweigh what you do wrong.
3 – how open and transparent to make your feedback
Firstly as a leader or manager, you must give a lot of feedback to your team members if you want to create a high performing team. Team members must know and understand what they are doing really well so they can do more of it. They also need to know what they are not doing so well at and how they can improve it.
It is your job to make sure they are really clear where they stand, good and bad.
Being open and honest with your feedback is telling it how it is, without sugar coating or watering down your message. Offsetting this is NOT triggering their emotions or making them feel under attack. High emotions mean they will not take in what you are saying, and you risk damaging trust and your relationship with them.
The more diplomatic and considerate you are combined with high levels of trust that you are trying to help them means the more direct, honest and to the point your feedback can be without triggering a fight or flight emotional response.
Make your feedback as detailed and structured as sensible. Be honest and be direct while also being diplomatic and considerate.
The very best feedback helps individual be better and get better at what they do.
To help you lead well and create great teamwork
Here are 7 questions to ask to be open and transparent with the right communications
How you communicate with your team members is a huge influence on how the everyone in the team will communicate with each other. The more open and honest you are, the more they will be too. Open honest communication is essential for creating great teamwork, which in turn improves team performance.
Secondly, the more company context you can provide to your team the more likely team members will make decisions that gets the team and business closer to goals faster. Helping your team understand the why behind initiatives, projects and team and company goals produces very real improvements in team performance.
There are plenty of things you should not share with your team. Classic examples include:
- Unhelpful battles for resources between more senior managers
- Politics, gossip and other distracting news
- Leadership team infighting or fallouts
- Debates about direction and strategy etc when it creates doubts or reduces confidence with staff
7 Questions
Managers and leaders should share useful information openly and honestly AFTER filtering that information. Here are 7 questions to help you filter the information you share which are:
- Does sharing this hurt mine or my boss’s credibility and authority?
- Does sharing this hurt the company or the leadership team?
- Will sharing this motivate my team and help them understand the bigger picture?
- Will sharing this promote dialogue and debate that will create understanding and ownership?
- How effectively will sharing this remove unhelpful speculation or fear in the team?
- Is the information confidential or sensitive and therefore should not be shared?
- Will sharing this information put down another person in the company?
In short – do your best to share information openly and transparently when it will help your team. When the information does not help your team, don’t share it.
Also remember that as a manager you are representing the business to your team. Don’t share information that damages the business.
Open and honest communication builds trust and creates great teamwork. Both help increase team performance. Be open and honest in how you communicate, to a point.
in summary
Leading and managing others is a difficult and complex job. At the heart of that job is building trust and relationships and communicating effectively to create great teamwork, which in turn increases the performance of that team. Increasing performance helps everyone.
You must be open and transparent to build trust and increase team performance. How open and transparent should you be is not a straightforward question to answer. I hope you now have a better set of tools to balance being open with keeping unhelpful information away from the team.
To answer the how open and transparent should I be, we have been through:
- What make great teamwork and why openness is a vital ingredient
- Demonstrating authenticity – what to share and what not to share
- How open and honest to make your feedback
- 7 questions to ask to keep communication open and transparent
Don’t forget to take a look at all the resources available to enable you to gain management expertise and confidence, quickly build influence and increase your impact, and move your management career forward a lot faster.
If you have any questions on “Leading & Communicating – How Open & Transparent Should You Be?”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
[Click here for further reading on being transparent with your team]
Being open and transparent in your communications in general is great for trust building in a team. Trust is a key component to increase team performance and team culture. A good question to always ask “Will sharing this help increase trust AND improve my authority and credibility?” If the answer is not yes, then think carefully before saying any more.
The best balance to achieve is different with every team and in every company culture. Always adapt your personal approach to the team you have and the environment you are in.
Be as open and honest as practical!
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