Transparency in organisations

January 28, 2010 in Leadership | 1 comment

I even started a new category when writing this post called ‘Leadership’. Let’s see if it’ll ever get another post.

Transparency is the topic. I read this book ‘Managing Values – Ethical Change in Organizations’ by Paul Griseri. Quite interesting book about the challanges of recognizing and managing values. One of the ideas at the last chapters struck me being something I’ve been thinking for a while applying practically in every organization I am connected to. School, work, church, projects, everything.

Section 11.4 is about transparency. Basically it first describes, that whenever there is some kind of event, people use various methods to process the data deriving from the event. They might use existing theories of corporate behaviour or ‘folk’ views of organizational behaviour – and then they will land to some kind of explanations. Let me repeat:

Event -> Data -> Processing -> Explanation

This process always happen, no matter how much data from the event there is to be processed. The quality of explanation depends heavily on the amount of data. Missing data will be filled by imagination. Let me rephrase again

If there is very little data, the explanations are of bad quality. Wrong conclusions. You don’t want it.

Then Griseri reveals something that is new but yet so familiar to many of us:

Individuals have beliefs about how much information to expect from managers for given type of event. Where decisions or events are trivial, it is often presumed that there will be no filter on information, and where something is sensitive it is often presumed that there will be a strong control on what information is provided and when. It is a great condemnation of management styles of the past that such assumptions have grown up, but they have and are now a fact of organizational life.

He keeps on with explaining how missing information is always interpreted being significant, and that the news will be bad. Redundancies in the air? Am I going to be made redundant? ‘They must be up to something, because we don’t know what’s going on.’

What does this imply about managerial behaviour? Simply that transparency is to be promoted in organisations for reasons other than that it is ethically desirable. Far more imporantly, it is the best way of having any chance of managing the values of the stakeholders of an organisation.

And he finishes reminding that of course every manager is not to reveal every piece of information – commercial confidentality is crucial for organisations.

Think about it.

Explanations will always exists. If there is a lack of data to process, explanations will be of low quality, and often have a bad effect on people, spirit & trust.