Corporate Transparency: Checking the Message
Transparency is trust. When New York did a study on anger during subway shutdowns they found that passengers were less likely to become agitated across the board during a shutdown if the transit authority was open and honest with why the service was interrupted. The reason for the change is rooted in basic psychology. If people do not know, or are not able to test, the facts of a situation they will imagine a scenario to fit what they do know and are able to test.
Corporate policy dissemination often sounds more like a game of telephone after an all hands meeting than is does a practiced symphony. I have been a part of meetings where an entire product map and outline was presented by upper management, links to important documents were provided, and goals were actively re-iterated, to have the production say they had no idea what the meeting was for, or how it affected them. Maybe the numbers don't make sense, so much of the meeting is jargon that it's hard for those without the proper vocabulary to keep up, or the entire process was designed without even considering that production would be present.
Take a moment to map how how many levels are between you and the production floor. As a manager, how far removed you are from the action dictates how well you understand its true action and function. If there is a manager in between where you are and the production space it is important to realize that person is telling the story everyone below them is hearing. Middle management acts as a filter and a buffer both up and down the line. It is good practice to make sure that the culture the mid-level managers are encouraging are the same as what's being stated as important by the c-suite. Even if the middle manager is quoting verse and script, there is always tone and intonation to judge a message by. It is important to take time and sample the message that the manager is giving, and the message that production is hearing. The same issue with bias and tone affects the thought processes of the production worker as well as the manager giving the message.
Everyone in management suffers from a bit of expertise bias. We all got where we are with our skills, talent, and education, usually in the production space that we have been deeply involved in for a while. Due to this a middle manager is going to have their take on what is correct about policy and procedure then act according to those assumptions. There is still office tribalism outside of a silo structure. This makes it even easier for the cultural message from the top to be skewed by those in the middle.
To upper management everyone's strategic role can be crystal clear, but unless the messages, stories, and roles that make up those strategies are clear, supported, and understandable by everyone on the team progress will continue to be a challenge. As managers we are told to be vulnerable. This is not limited to sharing personal, more humanizing stories at work. It is also essential that we show vulnerability in business by laying all of our cards out on the table to accept both the judgment, collaboration, and trust that such transparency ultimately leads to. In the end it's scary to be transparent because we open ourselves up to judgment in a way that is hard for an expert to do. Even though we know there are things we do not know, it is hard to learn we don't know a very specific thing.
