Extreme Transparency

Originally published on Tumblr.

This week my 16 year old daughter decided it was high time she reminded me how she felt about me. It was a teenaged case of extreme transparency.

By sheer coincidence, the week prior, my company held an offsite to discuss core company values. One near the top of the list was transparency. No one on the management team is 16, so no one argued in favor of complete corporate transparency. Instead we discussed the level of transparency we thought our company should adhere to, and how we should expect that level to change as the company grows.

Two interesting things came out of the discussion:

1. We concluded that transparency was more a question of trust than access to information.
2. We realized that all our company values were going to fall somewhere between extremes.

The relationship between transparency and trust is obvious.

I know that my country’s spy agencies can’t be transparent about their activity, and I have to trust that they aren’t abusing the freedom this lack of transparency gives them. When they break that trust, I demand more transparency.

On a more personal level, my wife doesn’t ask me to account for my time when I’m on business trips. If I made a habit of bedding chambermaids, and she found out about it, she’d almost certainly adjust her level of trust.

This gets us back to our 16 year old. As children grow older we adjust the balance between transparency and trust. Unfortunately, we have so little experience in this area, that we tend to get it wrong, leading to years of mistrust and anger. The same dynamic appears in any hierarchical organization, but in a different dimension.

In a parent/child relationship, the balance changes as the maturity gap shrinks. In an employer/employee, or manager/worker relationship, the balance changes as the distance in the hierarchy changes. In this case too, it’s so easy to get wrong, with predictable results.

So if transparency can’t be an absolute company value, can any other be absolute? I don’t know yet, but I suspect not. We’ve discussed generosity, heath, camaraderie, and excellence.

Should we expect someone to be generous to the point of damaging their health? Should we expect someone to be healthy to the point of being anti-social? And isn’t excellence often in conflict with itself? Can’t my excellent camaraderie interfere with my excellent work, or my excellent work with my excellent health?

One of life’s most heart-wrenching lessons is that absolutes so rarely live up to their original promise. They don’t just fail to do good, they often do harm. If that’s true, can we define clear, core company values without infantilizing the people we ask to embrace them?

I don’t know. It’s a puzzle we still need to solve.