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I was doing walk-and-talk check-ins with our Seoul team. The first meeting went great, a check-in over iced Americanos.
The second employee walked in and answered the same question I’d asked her teammate, word for word. They’d traded texts in the 75 seconds between meetings. That moment showed me: internal information moves faster than management.
Employees share everything now, including their 360s. We can pretend we control the narrative while employees screenshot Slack messages and share salary data. Or we can lead by setting the terms of transparency ourselves. Culture leaks through Glassdoor, LinkedIn and group chats. Why not build with intention?
After experimenting with transparency for thirteen months, I’m learning the rules.
Related: My Employee Used AI to Ask for a Raise. So I Used AI to Say No — Here’s What Happened Next
From building products to building culture in public
Developers pioneered “building in public.” They tweeted revenue charts and shared prototype GIFs. Their transparency attracted users, generated feedback and built investor trust.
Company culture can follow the same path, with one crucial difference: culture affects people, not code. The stakes are exponentially higher. A software bug breaks, you fix the code. Cultural transparency goes wrong, and you damage careers, relationships and safety at work.
Start small and test everything
Treat each disclosure as a product feature. Start with the smallest public unit you can handle. Measure impact. Iterate. We tied our company values to specific projects on our website. We showed how those values played out in practice.
Then we showed our salary band and had an open Q&A Zoom. The feedback was immediate. Employees appreciated knowing where they stood, compensation-wise. They had pointed out questions about the increase and advancement criteria we hadn’t communicated.
Transparency isn’t a virtue; it’s just a tool for building trust. Trust fuels team performance, retention and honest feedback loops that strengthen organizations. As you experiment with transparency, you’ll make mistakes. That’s where the next principle becomes crucial.
Humility as your operating system
Humility is your primary tool. I share my leadership missteps. Employees see that mistakes are normal, not fatal.
Recent example: I posted preliminary customer renewal data in Slack without context. Teams panicked, assuming crisis mode. Within an hour, I followed up with seasonal context and historical comparisons. I acknowledged my error and explained what I’d learned.
Lesson: add narrative, not numbers. Data without a story creates anxiety, not insight. When you mess up transparently, fix it transparently.
Outcome focus prevents performance art
Company transparency risks becoming performative with sharing happening for sharing’s sake. The cure: relentless outcome focus. Track how openness impacts business metrics: project cycle times, employee satisfaction scores, Glassdoor ratings and retention rates.
We share monthly business metrics with the entire team, not leadership alone. The team appreciates joining the conversation. Our employee net promoter scores have increased 12%, although it’s hard to attribute all the rise to one change.
But tracking outcomes is only half the equation. The other half is preparing your leadership team for a world where their every conversation might become public.
Retraining leadership for the public era
This approach requires retraining managers. Old coaching models assumed closed doors. Now, tough feedback conversations resurface as screenshots in group chats.
We teach managers to:
- State facts plainly without emotion.
- Speak as themselves, not corporate agents.
- Document their decisions and lead with the why.
- Assume conversations will go public.
Related: How Companies Can Develop Leaders Who Actually Deliver Results
When to pause
Even with seasoned managers, there will be situations when transparency becomes counterproductive. That’s why defining clear boundaries is essential.
We’ve laid out stop conditions. Active deals or employee safety threats require pausing disclosure. And we try to talk about scars more than active wounds.
People prefer hearing about resolved challenges rather than ongoing crises. Traumatic personal situations make strong disclosures, but only after resolution.
Transparency builds trust and alignment. It’s not a religious commitment overriding safety and judgment.
Not everything belongs in public. We distinguish transparency that builds trust from exposure that breaks it. Performance conversations stay private; public critique without consent is cruelty, not culture. Layoff discussions stay confidential until we notify affected employees.
We share salary bands, not individual salaries. We publish promotion criteria, not candidates under consideration. We’re transparent about strategic priorities, not M&A targets.
The test: Does sharing help our team make decisions, or create anxiety and speculation? Transparency empowers. It doesn’t paralyze.
The competitive advantage of transparency
Visible culture can’t be faked. You build the workplace you claim, not write mission statements.
Candidates self-select based on facts, not marketing. People who join know what they’re signing up for. Culture fit improves. Early turnover decreases.
The ongoing experiment
I don’t have a final blueprint. I have experiments, data points and faith that it’s what the company needs. You don’t build culture to publicize it. You publicize it to force yourself to build it. Your culture is already public. The only real question is: will you shape that or let it shape you?
I’m still figuring it out. But I’d rather build in the open than pretend in private.
I was doing walk-and-talk check-ins with our Seoul team. The first meeting went great, a check-in over iced Americanos.
The second employee walked in and answered the same question I’d asked her teammate, word for word. They’d traded texts in the 75 seconds between meetings. That moment showed me: internal information moves faster than management.
Employees share everything now, including their 360s. We can pretend we control the narrative while employees screenshot Slack messages and share salary data. Or we can lead by setting the terms of transparency ourselves. Culture leaks through Glassdoor, LinkedIn and group chats. Why not build with intention?
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