The article argues that it is impossible to control the image of your business anymore.
" 'You can't hide anything anymore,' Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders. There's Sony, which put a rootkit - a piece of spyware - on music CDs as a secret copy-protection technique, only to wind up in court when bloggers revealed that the code left their computers vulnerable to hacker intrusions. There's Microsoft, this time on the wrong side of the transparent shower curtain, offering to pay people to buff up the company's Wikipedia entry. And Diebold, which insisted its voting machines were unhackable - until a professor posted a video of himself rigging a mock election on them. The video went viral and racked up some 300,000 YouTube views."
The example they provide that drove this point home very powerfully was this:
"When Shel Israel and blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about wretched treatment by Dell's customer service, their posts were so gleefully linked to that for a while they appeared as the number one and two search results for 'Dell.' "
I found this article extremely intriguing. This made me think of transparency not only from a corporate standpoint (a company being transparent to build trust with customers, employees and investors) but also on a personal level.
Authenticity is an important element in the work that I do with The Henderson Group - leading workshops and coaching clients on their communication and presentation skills. This idea of transparency is strongly connected in my view. If you have developed superb communication technique but are not being fully authentic, your co-workers and audiences will sense that there is something amiss.
Transparency on a personal level translates to being vulnerable and up-front. It means revealing personal details and quirks. Trying to hide them suggests that you are concerned that people will discover your true self. That invariably comes across as lacking in confidence.
In our workshops we address the dynamic of "explaining" when receiving feedback. When we try to show that our intentions are perfect and there were understandable reasons for the reason that our performance was not perfect, we come across as defensive and lacking confidence.
Truly confident people (who know themselves and are willing to be seen as vulnerable and imperfect) project a rock-solid belief in themselves: "Yes, I made a mistake in this case but I still believe in myself."
It also means being proactive in pointing out our mistakes. I remember vividly early in my management career the lesson I learned about fessing up when I'd made a mistake.
If I did not report that mistake to my boss, ESPECIALLY if I tried to cover it up, he would be on me like white on rice. (Does the phrase "reamed" have special meaning for any of you, too?) If I went to him and said, "I've screwed up" and explained the problem, invariably he was very understanding and compassionate.
David Henderson, my dearly-departed former mentor and co-founder of THG, used to tell me, "Tell your first truth first." By that David meant that in moments of fear and confusion to turn inward and examine deeply what is most truthful for one's self.
A client recently asked me about giving feedback to her teenage children. She confided that they were often resistant to feedback. (Really?!?! Teenagers resistant to feedback from parents?!?! Alert the media!) I spoke about the idea of authenticity and framing her feedback as a positive statement. I asked her, "What is your core message? What is most important to you?" She thought for a moment and her voice dropped into a deeper register with her eyes welling up. She replied, "I want them to understand that I am setting limits because I care about them." I suggested that she make certain she said that when she speaks to her kids. "If they see that deep sincerity, they will get it. They may still resist but they'll understand and be more likely to comply."
Finally, the willingness to laugh at one's own foibles is a liberating way to demonstrate transparency. When I was younger (and much stupider) I used to spend inordinate amounts of energy focused on being "right." It was more important to me to be respected than liked, I have since learned (largely due to this work) is that vulnerability, transparency, warmth, good-humor and empathy are FAR more important.
One of my favorite writers, Frank Herbert (author of Dune, the world's best-selling science fiction novel) said something like, "A person who has the ability to laugh at one's self has taken a step toward the highest level of civilization."
The willingness to be up-front, vulnerable, show one's warts can go a long way in being authentic and building trust.
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