What if transparency max was normal?
|
Version 0 of 1. Honesty is a precious commodity in business, as the Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn knew. “I don’t want any yes-men around me,” he is supposed to have said. “I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.” Good bosses can handle the truth. They seek it out, they invite (constructive) criticism, they test their biases and assertions, they know that they are not perfect. But organisations are always political. And even in the most open and apparently healthy workplaces, it may not be possible for employees to be as frank as they would like with their superiors. When one person meets another a hierarchy is immediately formed, as John Hunt of London Business School used to say. Truth can be the first casualty of the career ladder. All of which makes the remarkable goings on at First Look Media, the business launched by the US billionaire Pierre Omidyar, even more unusual. Earlier this week one of the company’s star hires, the former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, quit. And just a few days later a chapter-and-verse account of what lay behind Taibbi’s departure was published on The Intercept, a website that is part of the First Look group. The piece – written by, among others, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, John Cook, and another star contributor, Glenn Greenwald – was startling in its detail. It was as though the staff had set up a launderette to wash month-loads of their company’s dirty linen in public. Journalists often like writing these kind of “tick tock” narratives about an unfolding story. But rarely do they get to do it about their own employer. This one is interesting because it reveals the difficulty of making idealistic notions about transparency and lack of hierarchy work in practice. It also tells you something about how different cultures can clash. Omidyar and his co-founders come from the hi-tech sector, with its love of technical and management jargon. They did not get rich by adopting an improvised or informal approach to their work. But then they hired journalists: equally hard-working, but also sceptical, anti-authoritarian and at times somewhat irregular in their working practices. The bosses promised informality and editorial freedom but then seemed to micromanage and dictate terms. The hoped-for “breath of fresh air” approach to journalism has turned out to be very hard to put into practice in a commercial setting. “It is much easier to talk about such high-minded, abstract principles than it is to construct an organisation around them,” the Intercept writers concede. New hires have instead been left experiencing “confusion, differing perspectives, and misaligned expectations”. But would some businesses and organisations benefit from a dose of “radical transparency”, as it is sometimes called? The answer is almost certainly yes. Think about how much time and energy is wasted on needless secrecy. For years now, employers have declared piously that their people are their biggest asset, and then, whether deliberately or not, have made it hard for those same people to contribute all that they could to the business. We are supposed to be trying to encourage innovation and creativity at work. How does rigid hierarchy and a culture of only partial truth-telling help with that? A freer flow of information and ideas is needed. As usual, some of this is just common sense. When managers talk about consultation, but then take decisions without any regard to the views of employees, they add to the cynicism and weariness of the workforce. When people are rewarded not for good work, but for sycophancy and consistency in supporting the “party line”, the same sort of disillusionment spreads. Paradoxically, employees may sometimes have a limited appetite for complete transparency and candour from their leaders. In difficult times bosses may have to provide what psychologists call “containment”: a (perhaps illusory) sense of security, the hope that even if the economic climate is harsh, some sort of better future is coming. The chief executive of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, knows that a confident demeanour, whatever the circumstances, may be needed. At the start of the financial crisis in 2008 he said: “You can’t sit there in front of over 300,000 people and say: ‘I don’t know what to do!’ You have to say: ‘We’re gonna nail this one, and here’s why!’” Transparency, like authenticity, is one of those fashionable words that get picked up by organisations, which then discover, as they try to live up to them, that they are more complicated than first appears. There can be unintended consequences. The discovery among senior executives of how much some of their peers are getting paid has not exactly led to greater restraint on top salaries. It could be hard for a fully transparent, non-hierarchical organisation to get vital decisions taken quickly. That is one conclusion to draw from the intriguing developments at First Look. Another is that it remains arguably quite a high-risk choice putting journalists in charge of anything. |