Listen to three executives’ perspectives on organizational transparency.
Workplace transparency builds trust, especially during times of uncertainty, which everyone has experienced during the past 18 months. But what does transparency look like inside organizations?
Are the expectations around transparency different for managers than for the individual contributors on their teams? What role does talent development have to play in organizational transparency?
CTDO recently asked three talent development executives for answers to those questions and their ideas and advice on how companies can be more transparent.
Kevin Tamanini
Kevin Tamanini is the director and head of consulting services for DDI’s US Operations.
Transparency is not a black-and-white topic, Tamanini says. But however your organization decides to define it, transparency boils down to what people are saying versus what they are doing and whether information is shared in a consistent and clear way.
Is there clarity about expectations between managers and team members? Clarity about how people can advance in their careers? Clarity about the organization’s values? You need that before you can have transparency.
Laura Lee Gentry
Laura Lee Gentry is chief people officer at Applied Systems.
She finds that although transparency has many facets, at its core it’s about culture. That means transparency must flow through leaders to their teams, from colleague to colleague and between the company and its customers. It embraces open and honest feedback and communication in all directions, and it lets clarity and connection be its North Star.
Robert S. Brodo
Robert Brodo is president and CEO of Advantexe Learning Solutions.
He explains that transparency is all about communication, whether that is between managers and direct reports or the enterprise and individual contributors. Not only power but also performance are dependent on information, so it behooves leaders to share with employees at all levels the overall strategy as well as the details and decisions about how they plan to achieve organizational goals.
Read more from CTDO magazine: Essential talent development content for C-suite leaders.
