As an IC and as a manager, I’ve always advocated for proactive, transparent communication from leadership. I recently heard someone say “companies always think they’re being transparent”, and it made me stop to think about what that really meant and how it affected the way that I’ve typically thought about transparency.

Transparency in communication has always been a really important value to me. I don’t like having to work from hidden information. I don’t like bad surprises. In general, I think we enable success when we give as much context as possible, as early as possible, and I think transparent communication has a strong tie-in with trust, morale, and psychological safety.

But that quote - “companies always think they’re being transparent” - made me consider whether a company (or leadership at a company) has the same definition of transparent communication as I do. So then the question becomes: is the company not being transparent in their communication, or are they not meeting my working definition of transparency?

For instance - there may be some topics that they just don’t think falls under the same need for transparency as I do. So when they don’t share information or context, they’re operating from a perspective of “we didn’t think this warranted transparent communication” rather than “lack of transparent communication”.

While I was thinking aloud on Twitter about this, someone shared that they have a must / should / nice to have model of communication:

• Must: I can’t do my job without this info.
• Should: It will make my job easier but it won’t stop me.
• Nice to have: I would like to have this but it won’t affect me.

I love this model, and it helped me broaden my thinking about transparency in communication! There are things that I think fall under “must know” in order to operate successfully, and there are things that leadership thinks fall under “must know” in order for me to operate successfully - and that Venn diagram is definitely not a circle 😅

This line of thinking brought up some additional questions for me:

• Is there a minimum amount of overlap within the different definitions that still contribute to a positive culture of communication (and thereby trust / safety / morale)?
• When does the divergence between my definition and leadership’s definition start to have a damaging impact?
• Is it amount of divergence, topics of divergence, or frequency of divergence that has a stronger negative impact?
• Are there ways to recognize, define, and agree on those overlaps and divergences? In advance?

Someone else on Twitter brought up a good point about transparency divergence when it comes to implicit versus explicit communication - meaning leadership may think they’re being transparent because they’re assuming implicit knowledge (“of course everybody knows X”), when in reality “everybody” is just that leadership group. Which of course brought up more questions to think about!

• How do people notice when they’ve hit a pocket of unintentional opacity?
• How can they effectively communicate that it’s happened?
• How can leadership iterate - if they choose to - so that it doesn’t happen next time?

And if you do decide to let leadership know that they were unintentionally opaque, you should consider things like:

• Is it safe to share?
• Will you be listened to?
• Do the people receiving that feedback think it’s important for them to know?

I love this kind of learning exploration, and I love being able to adjust my perspective on things like this as I continue to learn 😄 Instead of thinking about transparency as a static, narrowly-defined behavior, I can think about transparency as a spectrum where I desire some amount of overlap between my definition and a company’s definition in order to feel safe and trusting. I’m ending this exploration with more questions than I started with, but that just means I can ask better questions the next time this comes up!