Truth, Honesty and Transparency
A Business Culture is based on Trust, Honesty and Transparency
True transparency is crucial within a business from the top down.
Having openness builds trust between the managers and their teams encouraging clear communication, collaboration and understanding of others without the presence of fear.
Honesty with each other is only to be truthful, sharing creates transparency but lack of all three results in bad company culture. It leads to hurt feelings, silo working, back stabbing and uncertainty.
Leading with transparency shows the employee and employer clear expectations appropriately set and aligned goals are fulfilled. A team need to be united, whether that be the management team together or the management team with the rest of its employees. It is easy to slip into a scenario where the dynamics of a team are broken because one member isn't true to its team, you cannot afford to take sides, make comments about others on the team behind their backs, or appear to be anything other than equal, you have to remain united.
Full transparency can be achieved by following a few easy steps:
- Communicate honestly. Speaking honestly allows you to explain how you feel, what you're thinking, in a genuine way.
- Ask questions. Get to the core of what you are discussing and understand the root cause of people's beliefs and what is important to them. Allow everyone to contribute.
- Disclose information. Cloak and dagger, guessing games and assumption creates barriers and doesn't make a team included.
- Provide feedback. Good or bad gives an understanding of an individuals or teams performance. If they don't know how you feel they will become flat, disinterested and undervalued.
- Stay professional. You may gel better with some more than others or prefer individuals but a team is a combined effort and personalities shouldn't be either favoured or penalised. Nothing discourages a team more than a badly behaved employee not dealt with in the appropriate manner or just one person's views and suggestions actioned.
- Be realistic. Don't promise and then not deliver. Continually giving the team hope and then letting them down or not following through with what was promised will lose the teams momentum and trust.
- Share business performance. The team should be made aware of how the business is performing, whether this is on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. There should be metrics in place to measure performance, feeding back to the team and congratulating them on the good and talking through what can be improved on the not so good.
The culture of a business is what perspective employees are looking for (according to research carried out by Software Active).
Businesses that embrace a culture of transparency generate several benefits for their business and attract and retain the right people.
Transparency, trust and alignment bring businesses goals in focus. Its leaders have a clear sight of its vision and employees see how their contributions power business results. Transparency supports employee happiness and a better experience.
To achieve transparency, trust and team spirit, add goals that are visible to the entire workforce, the talk behind closed doors and secrets won't give employees a complete picture of what each person , from the bottom to the top, is to prioritise - plans for the business and agreement of the steps to take it there are.
Create clear channels for communication that flow both ways. Don't listen to the same members of the team, allow everyone to have a voice.
Hiding things from the team will make them become suspicious, and their trust - as well as their productivity and engagement - will dip or even diminish. Having a leader who has different views for different people in the team won't have a team for long, they will create 'yes' people and the manipulative ones amongst the team recognise this, taking advantage of getting things to go their way and finding the 'secrets' out. All respect is lost and the team becomes dysfunctional.
Work on your team, together your vision and align the goals.
Your team become chattier, happy, invigorated, innovative and your business grows, has a great culture and in turn your productivity and profits increase.
Business Glu can help you to work on your goals with truth, honesty and transparency with your team.
Let's have a call so that we can talk about how we can prioritise your needs and get you and your team to a different level.
