Transparency at Work: Why Authenticity Matters More Than Perfection

When I first joined Microsoft, and for the several years until I became a manager, there was a time of year that always caused me extra stress: the annual performance review. As a developer, I had to write a document describing what I accomplished that year, areas where I think I did well as well where I could’ve done better.

That document was submitted to my manager in late July. My manager, a guy named Brian who I trusted and respected, then did something with it that took another two months. Then, sometime in September, we’d have the Performance Discussion.

What happened in those intervening two months was anyone’s guess. Arcane concepts such as “stack ranking” and “forced curve” floated through the IC mindverse but nobody had clear ideas as to how those concepts applied to them, or, if they did, they weren’t talking.

Sometime in August the managers would recuse themselves into a 4-hour meeting titled Calibration.

I was always curious about what went on in those meetings. Did the managers arm wrestle for whose directs would get the top spots on this stack? Did they consult a Ouija board? Was my performance review based on Brian’s ability to get his way in this meeting, or on my strong performance record? And, if my fate was decided in this August four hour meeting, why did it take till September to learn the outcome?

It's all about the Benjamins

All the bigger-scale companies I’ve worked at so far have the same explicit or implicit taboo on discussing the calculus behind compensation decisions. The underlying assumption seems to be that employees can’t be trusted with the information.

I believe this stems from an overall American discomfort with disclosing the financial details of their lives. Can’t really blame HR if the culture they grew up in creates taboos around transparency.

In Sweden, where I worked for about four years a decade ago, anyone can look up anyone’s salary on a government website. People generally don’t care enough to do so. As a manager, I never had a case where one of my Stockholm directs demanded a higher salary because his teammate was getting more. If anything, being treated like adults created adult behavior.

Transparency is okay.

When I became a manager, I got to take part in the performance review process and discovered there was nothing mysterious or arbitrary about it. The whole thing was merely an attempt by a large-scale organization to evaluate their workforce in the most objective, systematic way they could come up with. There were quirks, of course, but what process is without them?

So, I began telling my directs exactly how the process worked. And you know what? Nothing terrible has happened yet. Because I believe in the way the performance review process works, I can explain it in a way that makes sense to my directs. And they appreciate the transparency this conversation brings to the process.

It’s not all about the Benjamins

Transparency matters in other areas as well. From an empathic perspective, transparency enables a manager to engage their directs in an authentic manner. Few managers can pull off the dissonance between their own opinion and the “opinion” they’re expected to promote without that dissonance being clear to their directs. The typical HR prohibition on negativity misses the mark. It isn’t the expression of a negative opinion that demoralizes. It’s making that negative opinion your sole talking point.

In other words, anything that happens within an organization has its negatives and its positives. If you as the manager focus entirely on the negatives without representing the positives, you’re doing both your employees and your organization a disservice. But as we just said, focusing on positives alone is detrimental also.

Authenticity requires the ability to examine the situation from a balanced perspective, and then representing that balance in conversation.

Transparency with people

This one is a bit more contentious, and really hinges on the culture on your team. If the team is overall collaborative and supportive of each other, enlisting them to help each other with issues they might be struggling with can help far more than if you were to engage directly.

Put more concretely, if you have a team member who’s struggling with a particular aspect of their job, enlist champions for them amongst the team. This would necessarily involve talking about that person with their team members. When I’ve done so, it has been with permission of the individual involved, and has never been to the entire team or in a public setting.

Here are two concrete examples:

1. A direct of mine, let’s call him Carlos, had been having issues with communication. He tended to be a direct communicator, I.e., saying exactly what he thought without an awareness of the relationship context around the situation. This, predictably, ruffled feathers on the team. Carlos and I discussed it, and agreed to work from both ends: I’d enlist a couple champions amongst Carlos’s peers to notice issues and raise them with Carlos. At the same time, I would work with Carlos to help him substitute caustic language with a more empathic one, as well as notice areas of concern and bring them up to him. I also talked to the team at large (with Carlos’s permission, of course), asking them to help Carlos as well. As a result of this concerted effort we managed to greatly improve both Carlos’s communication skills and the climate on the team.
2. Another direct, John, was struggling with code quality, as quickly became evident from peer feedback. After a discussion, we agreed to enlist a few developers on the team to pair program with John, helping him uplevel his coding skills. After several such sessions we saw a dramatic improvement, as shown by his code review feedback and overall delivery velocity.

The point is, provided the individual in question is okay with it, don’t be afraid to enlist the team’s help, and to be (relatively) transparent about the issues the IC is struggling with.

People don’t think each other stupid for making mistakes or lacking skills. They form an impression of stupidity largely based on close-mindedness – refusal to change one’s mind in the face of logic or data. So merely mentioning that someone is struggling with a skill won’t make the team think less of them. On the contrary, seeing someone struggle and overcome will earn the team’s respect.

Transparency on Self

Finally, the same principle applies to yourself. Do you work overtime to hide vulnerability from your team, your peers, your leadership? Do you try to appear invulnerable, perfect?

Stop it. We’re all human, and most of us aren’t stupid. We know you have flaws. We know you struggle. We all do. Hiding yours merely makes you seem disingenuous.

For example: I know I struggle with attention to detail. It seems to be a core personality trait rather than a skill, and something I haven’t fully addressed in my 28 years of professional life. I am upfront about that. I mention it in interviews. I mention it to my directs and to my boss. I talk about how I mitigate this issue – in my case, by surrounding myself with people who are great at attention to detail, and by building systems (note taking, task lists, etc) I can fall back on.

Being upfront about that enables more honest feedback from those around me, and that enables me to grow.

Embrace transparency

Look, transparency is scary. It’s vulnerable. It’s risky. There may be times when it will backfire badly.

But it’s worth the risk. The reward of honesty is trust, and trust opens all sorts of doors. So, be transparent. Be vulnerable. Be yourself.