Creating a Culture of Candor

candor I recently learned an important new word: candor. "Candor" is honesty, openness, sincerity. HBR ran an interesting article about this term and what it means for business some time ago: "What's needed next: A Culture of Candor" (June 2009) by James O'Toole and Warren Bennis.

When talking about 'enterprise 2.0' and openness and transparency, words like 'trust' and 'authenticity' are often also discussed. Another important aspect is 'candor'. The authors stress its importance due to the context we live and work in:

Now the forces of globalization and technology have conspired to complicate the competitive arena, creating a need for leaders who can manage rapid innovation. Expectations about the corporation's role in social issues such as environmental degradation, domestic job creation, and even poverty in the developing world have risen sharply as well.

According to the authors this context asks for a specific type of leadership. The metric of corporate leadership will be: "the extent to which executives create organizations that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable."

For leaders 'transparency' is one of the ways to go, although it seems to be contradictory to most leaders:

Organizational transparency makes sense rationally and ethically, and it makes businesses run more efficiently and effectively. But leaders resist it even so, because it goes against the grain of group behavior and, in some way, even against human nature.

Even though they know and are learning - as we all are! - that the "ability to keep secrets is vanishing - in large part because of the internet."

What leaders - and we all do - forget is this culture of transparency, of candor, does not come automatically. It's hard. It has lots to do with the way we see information and knowledge. And do we accept that knowledge is no longer power?

A culture of candor doesn't just develop on its own - the hoarding of information is far too persistent in organizations of all kinds. That said, leaders can take steps to create and nurture transparency. The bottom line with each of these recommendations it that leaders need to be role models: They must share more information, look for counterarguments, admit their own errors, and behave as they want others to behave.

So, what's the first step towards a culture of candor?

... create an unimpeded flow of information and an organizational climate in which no one fears the consequences of speaking up. ...extensive share of information is critical to both organizational effectiveness and ethics.

Because "...better information helps them make better decisions."

Now, let's get to work and create this culture!

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small ...
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an...
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as...
Read more