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>> Dr. Tasha Eurich: So I was once coaching an Oil and Gas executive
and in the process was doing a series of interviews with his team
to learn his strengths and weaknesses as a leader.
And the organization had set me
up in a beautiful corner office in their company headquarters.
And the day went great.
I interviewed everyone.
I got some really wonderful data.
And the next week when I was on site talking to my leader he pulled me aside and told me
about a very interesting rumor that had cropped up.
Apparently, the people that were sitting outside of the office had decided that I was a recruiter
and I had been hired by the company to interview everyone in the office to see
if they were going to keep their jobs.
You can imagine my surprise and my amusement followed by my shock and horror
that this had gotten so out of control and this is something that all leaders find.
One damaging rumor per week on average is what managers will hear or experience.
And it could be a very pervasive problem.
Typically the reasons that rumors come up are a general lack of trust and a general lack
of transparency that their leaders are showing their employees.
And the problem with rumors is that they hurt
in the bankable leadership language both people and results.
Here's why, on the people's side if employees feel like they're not being told the truth
or there's something happening that they're not aware of they are more likely
when the time comes to throw you under the bus, to resent you,
to feel like some nefarious intention is afoot that they don't know about.
On the result side, if employees don't know what's going on with your business,
with your strategy, with your operations, your financials, they cannot have the right line
of sight to contribute the right results to your organization.
So how can you as a leader encourage transparency in your company
to prevent these damaging rumors from happening?
There are two types of transparency that any leader has to master to get those benefits.
The first is called transparency of information.
What that means is do your employees have a clear line of sight into the decisions
that your company makes at higher levels.
For example, the strategy of your company, the decisions for how
to optimally operate the company.
And how is the company doing financially?
So the CEO of a company who I interviewed for my book had a very,
very tough couple of years during the great recession during 2008 through 2010
and she realized throughout the course of this crisis
that her employees had no idea how the company was doing financially.
They would cut a budget or they would conduct a situation where they had to reduce the resources
in the department but employees wouldn't know what the bigger picture was
and so she would say, here are your targets, here's what you have to do
but they wouldn't have any context for why they were making these decisions.
So she gathered all her employees in the front lobby of their building and said,
"It is time for us to be more honest with you.
We have not been intentionally withholding any of this financial information but we know
that we need to tell you everything so that we can get through this together."
And lo and behold, they're doing phenomenally well.
They did weather their recession.
And when I spoke with her for my interview for the book, she reflected that she didn't know
if they would be where they are now if they hadn't done that,
if they hadn't been financially transparent with their employees.
The second type of transparency is called transparency of intent.
And what that means is do your employees understand why you,
their leader are making the decisions that you're making?
And it's pretty obvious why they need to know this.
If you make a decision for example to cut 10 percent of the budget,
they might decide that you have nefarious intentions and the next thing is going
to be a layoff or you're just doing it to get to some endgame that they don't understand.
But if you say something like listen, I'm going to have to cut 10 percent of our budget
and the reason for that is we will not be able to continue to operate as a company.
I am not doing this to make your life harder.
I'm doing it because I know we need to do this
and tighten our belt so that we can remain viable.
It's a completely different conversation.
One leader that I interviewed, a CEO for my book had a situation recently
where their executive team had decided to go to a new email system.
And the reason they decided to do this was they thought it would be less expensive
and they actually thought the system would work much better than the old system.
So they went through the process.
Their IT team did a great job of moving them to the new system.
Lo and behold everyone hated it.
The CEO was getting 10, 20, 30 emails a day saying, we can't believe you did this.
This is an awful decision and everybody was getting very upset.
So she, ever the bankable leader, decided that she needed to communicate
with her employees what their intentions really had been.
They had not been to save money so much
that employees were not using the email system that they needed to use.
Their intention was not to make their lives more difficult, so she sent an email
to the entire company to clarify why they did what they did.
She said, "We're so sorry that this happened.
We actually did this because we actually thought it would make your lives easier
and we're hearing your feedback that it's actually made your lives much, much harder."
And of course they went back to the old email system and everyone rejoiced.
But the more important part of this story for me as a scholar of bankable leadership is
that she made her intentions clear.
She didn't allow her employees to make up rumors or stories or conspiracy theories.
She addressed their concerns head on and said why they'd done the things
that they had done and they also made it right.
So how can you create increased transparency in your team?
I'd like to give you five actions for unmistakable transparency
and you could read more about them in my book "Bankable Leadership" or by going
to my website bankableleadership.com.
Number 1: Make sure that you, your manager and your peers are completed aligned
in what you'll be communicating to your teams.
Now, this should probably go without saying but I am shocked
on a daily basis how often this happens, where a meeting will take place with a series
of decision makers, each person will go out and communicate to their team the outcome
of the meeting and everyone will tell their team something different.
So there is an easy way to determine at the end
of the meeting whether everybody is on the same page.
And that's just to ask a simple question what have we agreed
to tell our teams based on this meeting?
So make sure that you're aligned as a team
and as your peers before you're transparent with your teams.
Number 2: You have to be transparent about transparency.
I had a mentor once who told me the following wisdom.
He said, "If you know something and you can tell your team, tell them by all means.
If you don't know something, tell them that you don't know and make a commitment to find out.
If you know something but you can't tell them be clear about that
and tell them what the timeline is
that you think you'll be able to give them that information."
Number 3: You as a leader must build regular structure and systems
to get information out to your team.
I've seen many a well-intentioned leader have a moment of inspiration and say,
I need to communicate more with my team and then have a one meeting with them and never again.
Obviously, this doesn't help on a regular basis, so whether it's a daily huddle,
a weekly standup meeting, a quarterly town hall, you need to put regular systems in place
to share information with your employees.
Number 4: You need to actively seek out and squelch rumors.
I worked for a boss once who was incredibly bankable, who was this very, very,
senior level leader and would attend employee meetings and at the end
of the meeting she would always ask, what rumors are you hearing?
And the things that she would hear would always astound her.
But what she would be able to do in asking that question was put it out there to the employees
that she wanted to know what they were talking about.
But if they said here's the rumor I'm hearing,
they didn't even say here's what I think is happening,
they were able to put the rumor out in a pretty innocuous way.
And what she was able to do in also a very innocuous way was to squelch it and say,
"It's very interesting that you heard that.
Here's what's really going on."
So actively squelching and seek out rumors.
And then last but not least Number 5 is to know when to not be transparent.
I know that sounds somewhat counter intuitive but let me give you an example.
Let's say that your department is restructuring and employees know that something is coming
and maybe you have the best of intentions and you decide to share the half-formed org chart
that you're creating and then two weeks later you change it and then you tell them again.
The chaos and lack of trust that you can create just based
on that sharing the not fully formed org chart
and then changing it can be absolutely disastrous.
I've worked with companies that have had good intentions and shared half-baked ideas
or half-baked plans only to go on and change them.
So when to not be transparent is a matter of saying is this 90 percent
of what it will be or will it change?
And if it will change, what's the point at which we know we can competently share this
with our employees so as not to create anxiety and alarm.
So again, know when not to be transparent.
So these five actions should help you be more transparent with your team and I encourage you
to read more about it in my book "Bankable Leadership."
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