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Organizations need candor the way the heart needs oxygen. The more leaders fight transparency, the less successful they are. But how does an organization create an open culture?

Also See:
4 Tips For Creating A Culture of Candor
Where Will Your Next Innovation Come From?
How To Be A Better Leader

By Ellen Pearlman

Strategic Thinkers: Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James O'Toole

Credentials:

Bennis is Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and founding chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. He also serves as chairman of the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and has authored or coauthored several books.
Goleman authored best-selling books Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership. He is codirector of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University.
O'Toole is the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business and is the author of 17 books.


Big Idea:
Organizations need candor the way the heart needs oxygen. The more leaders fight transparency, the less successful they are. Book: Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor, by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James O'Toole with Patricia Ward Biederman, published by Jossey-Bass, June 2008

Transparency has become a buzzword, even when the powerful people using it have no intention of fulfilling its promise. The Internet has made it easy for information to flow freely, especially when it's bad news. Governments, companies and individuals have all discovered that the news about misdeeds and mistakes are readily distributed online. Customers, employees and citizens know the power of a blog and will use it to get their version of the truth relayed to others. And woe to the company or government that thinks it can control the message and fake its desire to be open.

The authors of a new book-Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor-say that many American organizations claim to believe in transparency when they actually practice opacity. A culture of candor, they say, requires a "free flow of information within an organization and between the organization and its many stakeholders, including the public." They also say that an organization's ability to compete, solve problems, innovate, meet challenges, and achieve goals "varies to the degree that information flow remains healthy." But achieving transparency in organizations is rare. And far too often information is hoarded and not shared with the very people who need access to it in order to make informed decisions.

There can be good reasons for keeping some things secret-competitive information about new products, for instance. But when information is routinely kept close to the vest and available to just a few executives, organizations have a problem. "One of the dirty little secrets of many organizations is a debilitating caste system that identifies a few as stars…and damns the rest as mediocrities," the authors note. Leaders need to act quickly, but if the CEO is making decisions based on the input of a limited few he is often making bad choices and discouraging collaboration and creativity in the process.

Companies, like families, have their secrets. And it can be tempting to keep the silence in order to remain a protected member of the inner circle. "In the world of work, conspiracies of silence are enormously damaging and all but universal," say the authors. "We have all worked in places where no one addressed the problem that everyone knew about: the office bully no one confronts; the budget games, where people skew numbers and exaggerate expectations; the board of directors that tacitly suppresses dissent to support a charismatic CEO; the arrogant doctor who makes mistakes nurses see but are afraid to point out."

Typically "groupthink" arises in companies where the leader is a poor listener, abrasive or out of touch. Hubris leads some executives to believe they know it all and not to seek or listen to advice from others. And often it is the employees furthest away from the executive floor who have vital information that those at the top need to know. "Wise leaders find ways to get information raw," say the authors, before it has been sanitized. George Washington solicited information from as many people as possible, even civilians, before going into battle. Compare that to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who told author James O'Toole after he questioned him about the accuracy of an assertion he made at a conference they both attended: "No one questions me! Do you understand that? I am never wrong."

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