You want the truth? Leaders can’t handle the truth.
Companies and leaders need to consciously build transparency and accountability into their cultures.
17 of the companies in the FTSE 100 openly state that transparency is a core value; one in ten claim the same for accountability. These are words that make the modern business world go round, if corporate websites are to be believed, and they are concepts that have been shown to resonate strongly with the personal values of millennials — the generation that now makes up the largest proportion of the workforce in the US.
Transparency and accountability —the chosen, deliberate kinds, not the dump-your-hard-drive-on-the-internet or FBI-enforced-backdoor kinds — are almost non-negotiable elements of modern, socially-responsible business. In the wake of corporate malfeasance from, for example, energy, automotive, and pharma companies that impacts not just customers but also communities and entire economies, companies must promise to be transparent and accountable in an attempt to build trust and pride. Try the alternative – what would be the reaction if we described ourselves as unaccountable and secretive?
But companies are clearly struggling to keep up with what it really means to be transparent and accountable.
The problem? Thanks to changing career expectations, the aforementioned abuse of the public trust, and most of all the rampant wave of social technology, transparency and accountability come with a radically different set of expectations to those of 20 years ago. To be truly accountable and transparent requires a conscious and significant shift in culture that unavoidably starts with leadership.
Technology defines the modern business context, but it is also a magnifying lens trained permanently on a company’s culture and behaviour. Where previously a disgruntled employee might grumble (about her manager, the unfair promotion process, or any one of a number of transgressions against her values and expectations) to a handful of friends in the pub on a Friday, she can now choose to share her experiences on Instagram, Twitter, or a site like www.Glassdoor.com, where companies get literally hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month (check your own company’s profile to see how many you’re getting – it’s there, even if you didn’t set it up. Glassdoor is not opt-in), all looking for the insider view on a company’s culture, prospects, leadership and employee experience. Our disgruntled employee now shares her opinion, anonymously, with anyone who wants to understand what it’s genuinely like to work there. Through social technology, her voice has been amplified until it is almost as loud as her employer’s, and you’d better hope that what she’s saying matches up with what your-company-dot-com-slash-careers says. Social media redresses the balance between employer and employee. Curious individuals who follow your company’s Twitter account can read the party line – but they can also read ALL the responses, on the same platforms, in the same font size.
In other words, to be transparent or not to be transparent — that’s not the question. The real question is whether or not a company decides to embrace the transparency that is forced upon them.
Most companies have unhappy employees, and there will always be employees who choose to set off a few fireworks on their way out the door – as users of tripadvisor, Yelp, AirBnB and so on understand, it’s easy to ignore the occasional bad review. But when aggregate reviews start to tell a story that doesn’t gel with the one we want, that creates an issue — and I think it’s taking a long time for companies to realise they don’t own the narrative anymore. There’s a fundamental leadership penny that needs to drop – assuming you control the channels, ignoring the bits you don’t like and hoping they go away, thinking you can shout louder than your employees. The trend for ‘ask me anything’ sessions on Reddit, the Internet’s mosh-pit, is dying out after a series of high profile crash-and-burns by companies and celebrities who thought they controlled the narrative and didn’t actually mean ‘ask me ANYTHING’. People are breaking into your house and taking your dirty laundry out into the streets.
Instead, borrowing from the principles of lean startup and the principle of ‘fail fast and often’, companies can turn mistakes and problems into a positive experience for themselves and their employees, by acknowledging them early, and using them as learning experiences. Leaders can increase employee engagement and influence the narrative through genuine authenticity and accountability – by getting up on their feet, celebrating success and recognising the issues in the same breath – and shifting their communication from top-down broadcast to peer-to-peer dialogue. As Howard Schulz said, on the turnaround he engineered at Starbucks, ‘We had to admit to ourselves and to the people of this company that we owned the mistakes that were made’. Still the exception though, not the norm, and the larger the company, the more twitchy its leaders are around embracing true transparency. And beware the ‘shit sandwich’ — burying bad news in between two bits of good — it’s an old trick that most of us see through very quickly and that either obfuscates the true message or comes across as disingenuous.
Companies have every right to respond to criticism and negative reviews. More than that though, companies who genuinely want to demonstrate true accountability and transparency (not just the 17 with the value on their website, presumably) have an opportunity to get back onto the front foot and join conversations that are happening without them. It’s more complex than just diving in and saying sorry; you need to do more than pay lip-service, and an apology needs to be followed swiftly by a clear plan to address the issue – but the impact of a leader standing before his or her people reflecting on the issues, agreeing that they are real, and indicating a willingness to engage in dialogue with employees can have a seismic impact on engagement, credibility and leadership perceptions across a company. We saw fantastic increases in engagement in one business as a result of a leadership team deciding to post the company’s up-to-date financial performance on the walls of the offices, coupled with a first-of-the-month all employee meeting to review performance against the business plan, openly and honestly, recognising achievement and challenges equally.
True, accountable leadership is still scarce, and company cultures, for the most part, are still too scared of transparency. As long as companies see failure as a weakness, and assume that if they don’t talk about it, no one will hear about it, transparency will remain a value in word only; something promised but not delivered, and a threat to integrity. But leaders and companies who approach employee engagement and communication as a dialogue rather than a lecture can be a part of the conversation and contribute to it. The alternative is not to control the conversation, but to be left out of it altogether.
