Why Transparency Matters at Work and Personal Life

I’ve realized I’m in a personal quest to become much more transparent than I’ve ever been. Instinctively, I’ve always tended to avoid confronting uncomfortable situations. That doesn’t mean many times I’ve moved my ass to act or raised my voice, but doing that has first required an internal effort.

Embracing healthy conflict has led me into deeper self awareness, which has led me to the need for transparency as a core value to live my life. A value that, I find, ultimately results in honest relationships, feeling proud of myself, and like Paulo Coelho puts it:

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it” — Paulo Coelho

…only if you’re transparent about it.

What do I mean by Transparency?

Transparency means being open, honest and upfront.

It means listening to and sharing emotions, like when you’re happy, satisfied, concerned or angry.

It means trusting people with information, making them aware of its importance, and making them responsible to safeguard it.

What to be transparent about?

So in a bullet list, about:

• The high level story of how you got to where you are

• Values

• Emotions

• Motivations

• Goals

• Needs

• Expectations

And within an organization:

• The strategy

• The finances

• The problems

Why do I care about being transparent

I believe wonderful things come out of being transparent, both at work and in personal life.

Transparency means putting yourself out there, and letting things that resonate with you get attracted to yourself.

You’ll always be attracting and repelling people and opportunities in life, no matter what you do. The more transparent you are, the more you’ll attract things that are good for you, that connect to who you are.

As I read recently in the book Ikigai, just put yourself out there. “I’m here, this is me, and this is what I like and do”. Create serendipity. Create opportunities of things happening to you attracting what you connect with.

It takes self-confidence to do that. Sometimes we don’t have it. That’s okay. In the case, do it as much as you can. It’s like a muscle. It’ll get easier with time.

And when transparency combines with self awareness and integrity, I believe we can really attract amazing things in life that resonate with us. Friendships, partners, work opportunities, money, fulfilling experiences in life…

For example, my new job at Haddock, which I’m very excited about. The opportunity has arisen after being transparent of my 2025 goals with business partners, and then they connected me with those that were interested in what I wanted to offer.

At work, lack of transparency smells like lies

People are smart.

We all can sense when things are off. When management actions don’t match their message. Or they don’t look emotionally connected to what they say.

When things feel off, people act in ways that definitely don’t help the company do better. At first, people will ask questions, but eventually, they’ll disengage. Look for alternatives. Keep their paycheck without really caring for the company. The ship is sinking.

As managers, we can get frustrated that people don’t care about the company or the clients. But as my favorite question goes:

What was it about my leadership that led to this outcome?

If we aren’t being proactively transparent with our teams, we aren’t trusting them. And if we aren’t trusting them, how can we expect to receive back their trust?

So let’s break the cycle. Let’s be transparent.

A culture of transparency fosters connection and motivation

We can feel part of what’s happening, when we have the full picture.

We can see our contribution.

Or maybe we can see we have no contribution, and thanks to our culture of transparency, we can talk about it and look for solutions.

Because with transparency, problems can be seen, can be discussed, and can be worked on.

Without transparency, we don’t even know what problems exist. We don’t know what others are going through. We don’t know what our company is going through. How the hell are we going to want to be part of it in that context.

As managers, keeping transparency in our team

So important. By being open, trusting and upfront with our teams, we’ll build a strong sense of loyalty to the organization that will serve us during tough times.

Trust goes both ways, but the person in higher power (the manager in this case) needs to give it first.

We can use the last minutes of a standup to share relevant updates.

We can use 1:1s to share important information with each person.

As much as we can, let’s be honest about our thoughts about how the company is doing. Let’s not oversell things.

And let’s be honest and transparent about how each person is doing in the company. Tough feedback is harder to deliver, but it’s the only feedback that will turn someone around and enable them to become a high performer.

It isn’t easy to be a manager and also care deeply about transparent. Sometimes they are at odds, like when we know people will be laid off and need to pretend everything’s ok. But as long as it’s occasionally and later on we can open up, we can do it.

We must remember that it’s part of the job to be positive, because you can’t afford the repercussions of your negative energy trickling down. For more on this topic, listen to this podcast about avoiding the negativity trap. But values must go first. Honesty must go first. If we’re forced to lie to your team, it’s time to look for another job.

Transparency creates disappointment

We can disappoint people in many ways. Disappointment originates from mismatched expectations.

Whenever we don’t meet the expectations others have, they’ll feel it.

That’s okay.

Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. — Glennon Doyle

Here’s the video of Conor Neill where I learned about this powerful quote:

Disappointment breaks trust when we’re opaque

If we’re opaque, when others find out or hear about something that disappoints them, their trust in us will be a bit more broken. Because the message we’re sending is:

“Today you learned this thing about me or my company that I hadn’t told you before, and you thought there was nothing to learn, so who knows what else I’m not directly telling you now, or I won’t directly tell you in the future”.

So when I meet people that feel opaque, either because they show off a lot or because it seems they have other things going on they aren’t open about, I suspect that such disappointments will eventually come.

The proactive solution? Asking for transparency. No matter if it’s a personal relationship or at work, asking for transparency is taking responsibility.

Compensation Transparency seems very interesting

I’ve never worked in an organization where each employee can see everyone else’s salary. But it sounds very interesting.

It’s a courageous step towards making money less of a taboo in our society, and how much we judge each other based on it.

I’d love to work one day in a company with compensation transparency.

Besides, there’s a practical benefit that with compensation transparency: it’s harder to allow strong salary disparities to happen.

Transparency requires with other traits to be valuable

If you’re a very intolerant racist who happens to be very transparent, I appreciate your transparency, but I don’t want you around me or honestly around anyone else.

I think that transparency as a way to connect, build trust and help us achieve higher grounds has to be paired with tolerance, self awareness and humility.

Radical Transparency

The higher level of transparency is what I see in Ray Dalio’s Principle of Radical Transparency.

I find it very inspiring, and I want to be surrounded by such an environment.

But it sounds that being radically transparent is hard. It’s easy to announce that we’re adopting transparency at work, but it’s hard to actually do it when finances are bad, situations are uncomfortable, or we just don’t know what to do.

Go ahead, and take a look at Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency.