Transparency and secretiveness

I had this discussion in a professional manager gathering couple of years ago. The importance of keeping transparency in an organisation is vital to its success. On the contrary to this seemingly chorused agreement, the reality shows us there are more than enough managers who love secretiveness, to maintain a secure position within the organisation, in essence. However, you would find yourself being blamed as making sweeping comments - 100% transparency is dangerous. Is it really? For me, with sound justifications, a group of people is generally capable of identifying the boundary of usage of certain information. Consequently, you have your domain-of-transparency.

How transparency would jeopardise some managers' position in an organisation? It is not difficult to see that transparency will certainly remove the requirement of the existence of message passengers as a start; secondly, as plan and information flowing openly throughout, there is a much shorter hence efficient bi-directional path for communications, especially those need buy-in or general support; in the meantime, the variety of information interpretation will be minimised which leads accurate decisions; transparency also helps to build trust relationships among team members; ultimately, transparency makes life simpler as you will save all your time from thinking and remembering all the different stories and persons, trying to keep them consistent with all possibilities for combination and permutation.

So why do we still love the secretiveness?

Feeling special is nice. One of best way for normal people to feel special is to exclusively hold certain information, especially when these information carry great deal of gravity to make things happen or fail. Unfortunately, importance of information has been now very much appreciated by this generation. To take advantage of the holding privilege, it is not entirely surprising to see some managers decide to utilise the selection of coterie to build up connections upon which they would consider as special bond or empowering. The safe assumption made was that the chosen ones have the similar standard of feeling special and important. Till this point, it is not too hard to see how this would start a vicious loop effect on the organisation culture. One of the key evidence you would easily identify in an empire building exercise is nothing else, but the secretiveness.

You have got to ask yourself, "do I love being secretive, or just I have to rely on it to survive?" As I have said in the beginning of this post, it is not even about being honest or not, keeping transparency is simple, easy and good for those who want to have a life :-). We do not have to bury us in the middle of all sorts versions of the same story.