Transparency as Key to Trust

“There’s no trust, and everyone on staff expects to be part of every decision.” It’s a complaint I hear often from leaders at nonprofit organizations, and describes a situation that — having spoken separately with staff and their supervisors — I see differently. 

The staff I most often speak with are in the sector because they believe in equity, accountability, and justice, and they want to see it manifested in all the ways an organization operates — internally and externally. They call for the organizations they work with to operate with transparency, and they are firm believers in good process. 

If you want these staff to be engaged and committed you can’t expect that they will fall in line with leadership decisions without knowing how those decisions are made — no matter how much they might like the person making those decisions.

I have heard this conflated by leaders to mean staff want to make every decision. For sure, there is a greater call for shared decision making (shared by staff and shared by the communities organizations serve) but when I meet with staff the complaint is actually more often about a lack of understanding of who made decisions and why rather than about a specific outcome. They are not made privy to criteria or process, and often staff don’t even know if a particular decision was ever made or if the idea just died on the vine. 

I sometimes hear leaders complain because they see staff’s constant questioning as a lack of trust, but maybe that kind of trust isn’t what we should strive for. Maybe the idea that leaders should ever earn carte blanche is misguided. Individual discretion leaves a lot of room for bias, discrimination, and error, while set process and transparency — while still requiring good judgement in application — can provide guardrails.

An organization that relies on transparent systems for decision making rather than just the judgement of individual decision makers also has more stability to weather turnover and has organizational coherence in decision making — coherence across different decisions but also across departments and decision makers. And a transparent process can allow for mapping of opportunities for more input into the process.

In an organization with adopted, transparent processes the role of leaders shifts from that of knowing and choosing what is right to being the steward and guardian of good process. And in sharing this process transparently with staff, a leader is not merely asking for trust but rather is first evincing it.