The Transparency Trap

When staff complain about a lack of transparency, nonprofit leaders commonly respond by promising more.  This rarely works because the perceived lack of transparency is usually obscuring a more significant problem—a lack of trust.  The understandable inclination to increase transparency without confronting the underlying challenge around trust is the essence of the transparency trap.

Transparency and Trust

Transparency in the nonprofit sector refers to the availability of reliable information about the organization.  It enables a more democratic—or at least more distributed—orientation towards power.  Giving staff more information about their work place and more of a role in decision-making is associated with valuing them both as employees and individuals.  Transparency can enable more and higher quality feedback that can inform and improve organizational decision-making.

Trust is the sense that others are speaking and acting with consistency, integrity and good will.  Trust in also tied to confidence in the ability of others to follow through on commitments.  Trust is efficient.  If I believe what you say, I don’t have to use my time and energy to manage the risk that you’re being untruthful.  Within my organization, I will assume processes and systems work—I won’t need to create workarounds.  Trust minimizes stress and promotes a sense of well-being.  Trust enables me to focus my time and energy on doing my job.  At a deeper level, trust—at work and elsewhere—is foundational to feelings of safety.  

To be fair, transparency is much easier to engage with than trust.  Transparency is a process value.  It implicates how information is shared and how decisions are made.  There are specific, measurable actions that can be taken to increase transparency.  Trust is a relationship value and so closer to our hearts.  Being worthy of the trust of others is essential to who we are in the world, so criticism will often feel intensely personal.  

Addressing an absence of trust by offering greater transparency can exacerbate the underlying problem. “Greater” transparency doesn’t have any obvious limits, while complete transparency is neither practical nor desirable.  Organizations cannot function without limiting transparency.  The larger the organization the less direct relationship between most information and decision-making on the one hand, and most staff’s work responsibilities.  Developing common understandings of what information means—an essential element of consensus-based decision-making—can be extraordinarily difficult and time consuming.  Information itself is rarely static, creating a litany of problems in sharing it as it evolves.  Some information is too sensitive to be widely shared, as when it pertains to an individual staff person.  So complete transparency is not an option.

And yet promises of greater transparency rarely contemplate clear limits.  Standards for limiting transparency are themselves opaque—if they exist at all—making those limitations seem arbitrary if not ominous.  Choices to limit transparency are commonly ad hoc, resulting in inconsistencies either over time or in similar circumstances.  Each time an expectation of transparency is left unfulfilled and unexplained, trust is eroded.

So what can you do if staff are demanding greater transparency, but promising greater transparency is likely to set you up for failure and exacerbate the underlying challenge?

Avoiding the Transparency Trap.

As it turn out, quite a bit:

Establish shared expectations about transparency.  Explain some of the challenges of transparency and how those play out in your organization.  Spell out what you will not be transparent, notably HR issues but possibly others.  These are areas where you are effectively saying, “You need to trust me.”  These shared expectations will be helpful reference points when disagreements about transparency emerge. 

Hold yourself accountable to those expectations.  Whatever expectations you set, you will inevitably fail to always meet them.  Minimize the damage—and even strengthen trust—by acknowledging whenever you fall short whether in spirit or deed.  Remember, staff already know when you’ve messed up, so use this opportunity to show yourself as self-aware, honest, brave and committed to meeting expectations.  In other words, trustworthy. 

Develop and use tools of transparency.  Communication practices as simple as regular emails and staff meetings can go a long way to building a culture of transparency.  Provide regular opportunities for staff to ask questions.  This allows them to pull information that they’re interested in, for you to reaffirm that you’re being as transparent as appropriate and yet also uphold limits as need be.

Focus on the work.  Transparency and trust can be put in better perspective by reference to  the work your organization and staff hold dear.  Centering decisions, including those about transparency, on the work will actually make those decisions easier for staff to understand and appreciate, even when they disagree. 

Improve trust.  There’s no easy solutions.  A trust deficit develops over time and takes a sustained effort to reverse.  The point here is to take on the issue directly.  Transparency alone will not be enough.