Network effect of authentic transparency at workplace
The challenge
As a responsible leader, you are probably spending as much time as possible visiting teams or testing the true state of affairs in some other ways. In the context of geo distributed organisations and the remote workforce reality, this is not an easy task.
There is also a very fundamental problem - as the number of teams, the organization structure and the number of projects increase, the complexity of human interaction and the general culture of the company increases as well !
- Is your organization spending significant efforts on talent retention, acquisition, and overall performance of teams?
- Are you still struggling with the bell-shaped human competency curve superimposed on the complexity of human interactions, feelings, and personal goals?
- Do you feel that there are fads when it comes to work culture, and that nothing can replace direct interaction, authenticity and character building?
The solution
Organisations invest into all kinds of pipelines, e.g. continuous delivery and other, for the purpose of simplification, greater agility, and reduction of costs. The work culture is no different.
Grassroots experiences should be thought of as a pipeline. Real-time capture of experiences is not simply about feelings (e.g. expressions of joy or being ticked off). This flow of information is factual and captures both feelings and specific technical / business process effects.
Transparency does not resolve existing issues overnight. Leaders and teams need to work together on breaking through the walls of
perspective and mutual accountability challenges.
It is typical to observe varying reaction to transparency:
- Some groups of people will remain silent because they may not feel influential enough
- Some other groups of people will be significantly louder than others
- Someone else, normally at the tip of the bell curve, will choose to stay somewhat quiet - e.g. wait and see
This is normal and expected.
What will happens as you keep investing into the safe transparency pipeline:
- Most capable people’s mindset will change as you start plugging in harder data points into the real-time information flow - for instance flaky process (connect CI and capture Red Masters into experiences flow), or anything else that affects velocity, planning, alignment, customer experience, etc.
- The loudest people will either find better ways to convince the organization to change, or they will learn to deal with the claim or of less valuable ideas
- Quiet underachievers will tag along to specific experiences and build confidence in being more engaging
The trick of authentic transparency benefits is that you can have org structure complex, yet simple cultural and political environment.
Learn more how you can get started.
The Network Effect
The network effect of transparency is such that unidirectional and clustered communications become exposed to each other. The result is a greater relationship between perspectives. This interconnection of perspectives is powerful - common context is the one that combats confirmation bias and Ivory towers.
Command-and-control with limited transparency
- Clustered perspectives
- Lack of common galvanising context and a sense of journey
Effective transparency with systems thinking network effect
- Ability to connect the dots and form a common context
- Build the culture of a common journey
- Visible cause and effect of mutual accountability
- Trusted picture because data points are pushed directly from the grassroots without lag or gate-keeping
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