Perry Maddox shares practical, award-winning tips for transparent leadership to build trust and accountable cultures.
The results are in.
Every year I look forward to reading the results from our staff survey. We ask hundreds of diverse staff across 10 countries to evaluate our performance. One question asks if they believe that Restless Development is transparent and accountable to young people, to communities, to partners and to staff.
This year, 96% said yes.
It wasn’t always this way. No so long ago, only 65% of staff responded positively to a similar question.
So what changed? Over time, a small team with no budget generated an award-winning approach to transparency. Naturally, we had many ups and downs, learning plenty from failures and successes as we built, trialled and adapted our approach to transparency.
Here are a few tips for leaders that I picked up along that journey of transparent leadership:
1. Lead Visibly, from the Front.
If transparent leadership approaches are new, you may face questions and resistance to changing the culture.
Creating a few quick wins as a role model will help. Keep it easy at first. Look for existing systems and processes you could adapt to be more transparent. Little changes add up, and they’re easier to make happen.
An easy entry point is your calendar. Our scarcest resource is our time, so why not show our people how we use it? Change those calendar settings. Let people see how you use your time. Show them what you prioritise every day.
Another starting point is social media. Never underestimate the power of pulling back the curtain on how leadership really happens and how it feels by sharing from your journey and life.
2. Create the Spaces to Practice Transparent Leadership.
Transparent leadership must be consistent.
It’s not something we do one day and not the next. The goal is to make it a natural, regular element of our leadership.
At first, it might be hard to know where to begin. If so, don’t be afraid to create the spaces that you need. Town halls, all staff meetings, one to ones, chat sessions, Q&As where teams can ask you anything. This is where you regularly practice and build the habit of transparent leadership.
You may need to schedule these at first. Over time it becomes more natural.
3. Repackage, Repackage, Repackage.
Make it easy, busy leaders.
If you’re like me, you’re already generating a lot of reporting for management, for boards, and for donors. Given all the work to produce it, why not lightly re-purpose that information for broader sharing?
The four times a year that I condense our quarterly board reporting into a brief that goes to every staff member globally are among my most impactful days as a leader. All I do is cut down a pile of existing information and add a note sharing what’s on my mind as a leader, and it connects 300+ people to our latest globally.
4. Build a Culture that Demands Transparent Leadership.
Hopefully people will welcome your transparent leadership.
You want them to expect and demand it. Transparency can’t be down to a single leader’s style or benevolence. It needs to be hardwired into the culture.
Simply being transparent isn’t enough. You need to talk about why transparency matters and why we commit to it. You may need to train your team on how to use the information you share. I run regular sessions with teams just after my quarterly report goes out. It’s a great way to generate discussion and to learn together.
More importantly, it conditions those teams to expect and to engage with transparent leadership.
5. Walk the walk.
Align your transparent leadership principles with broader organisational priorities.
Where you have related strengths, like how well your programmes adapt to open community feedback, make the conceptual link to how leaders must work similarly in the organisation.
Where you have weaknesses, use a transparent approach to shine a light. Take public ownership as a leader. Share the problem with your people, open the discussion to generate solutions, and welcome people to hold you to account for making sure it happens.
Transparent leadership is practised, not announced. Make it stick by sticking it to your core business.
This Trumps Transparent Leadership Every Time.
The danger with transparency is that it becomes a one-way flow of information.
Things get interesting is when the exchange goes both ways. Not just sharing information, but inviting insight, collaboration and ideas. Acting on what your people and communities share. That’s accountability. Our real goal.
Transparent leadership is the foundation. Without you opening up, it is harder to bring people in. Remember, you’ll never share it all, like confidential or personal information. You don’t have to open up all at once, either.
So what are you waiting for?
Each step you take as a transparent leader is a step for your people and your impact.
You don’t need a survey to prove that.
