What It Takes To Create A Culture Of Transparency
How to create a culture of transparency
Good cultures don't just happen but are built carefully and deliberately. That’s why when I’m asked for advice around cultures by business owners I advocate spending time designing and envisioning your culture early on. Otherwise, as a founder you are likely to wake up one day to a grown business and to the fact that you simply don’t like it, don’t identify with it and it feels foreign to you. This is why business culture needs tending to during your company’s startup phase, so it may blossom later on.
Here are a few things you can implement at the early stage of your business so they carry through its adolescence and all the way to its maturity. And also, help build a backbone for a culture of transparency.
Treat your people like adults. This may sound obvious but has far-reaching consequences. Put them in charge of the important resources such as their time and energy management. Each one of us works best according to a different rhythm. As adults, we should be in control of when and how we work to be able to achieve optimal results.
Invest in an external consultant to help you define your members’ individual values and, in consequence, your collective values. Figure out how you are going to make sure those values dictate what business decisions you make on a daily basis other than remaining an aspirational poster on the wall. Likely, from someone else's perspective, this seems like a huge waste of chargeable time. I caught myself thinking in that way in the past. Until I understood that by taking time to bring things like our values into our organisational consciousness, we are training my company GrantTree to be stronger and more sustainable.
Create a robust recruitment strategy and framework. Make sure you hire with culture and values in mind, as opposed to just professional capability/role fit. In my company we used Robert Kegan’s Subject-Object Interview to help determine a candidate’s capacity to deal with complexity and therefore to self-manage in all areas of their work.
Once strong foundations of your organisational culture are in place, it’s easier to start introducing elements of transparency. Those can be operational and financial transparency. If you’re ready for full transparency on an operational level and also prepared to distribute power throughout the organisation, you can implement a system like holacracy which will encode autonomy and agility into your company. This will make it super easy for new joiners (and anyone from the outside looking in) to understand exactly how the company is structured and how decisions are made.
Transparency on a financial level requires quite a bit more courage to implement. At GrantTree we have been financially transparent (company accounts and full payroll accessible to every new joiner) ever since we started. However, implementing financial transparency in an established company will be more difficult for obvious reasons. The right thing to do here might be to roll out transparency gradually, starting with just one department or section of the company.
Yet another layer of implementing a transparent, open culture is to bring about self-set pay. It took us a few years at GrantTree to be operationally ready for this. We began the process by starting a Pay Committee, a group of several - both senior and junior - team members whose role was to establish a pay system. The Committee came up with the pay matrix we still, with some modifications, use and placed people on it with the help of their track record, the complexity and uncertainty involved in the role they performed, and peer-to-peer feedback.
In my view, transparency represents the future of business. This is particularly obvious given recent scandals to do with secretive pay culture in some corporations and an ongoing debate on the subject in British media. The sooner you make your culture ready for operational and financial transparency, the more you will thrive in the post-Covid world of business.