The Transparency Trap

Ethan  Bernstein

Article | Harvard Business Review | October 2014

The Transparency Trap

Abstract

To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But less transparent work environments can yield more-transparent employees. Employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and approaches within certain zones of privacy. Organizations allow them to do that by drawing four types of boundaries: around teams of people (zones of attention), between feedback and evaluation (zones of judgment), between decision rights and improvement rights (zones of slack), and for set periods of experimentation (zones of time). By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can encourage just the right amount of "deviance" to foster innovative behavior and boost productivity.

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Bernstein, Ethan. "The Transparency Trap." Harvard Business Review 92, no. 10 (October 2014): 58–66.

In this article, we summarize our research on the value of intermittency for complex problem solving at work and give practical advice on how organizations can improve the rhythm of their people's collaboration. Executives have been counseled to be collaborative leaders and to set the example at the top that they want to see in the rest of the organization. They have taken this message seriously, transparently devoting more and more of their days to in-person and online collaboration. By role modeling such ubiquitous use of collaboration technology, business leaders have helped define an era of always-on collaboration. It is now time to role model a more sustainable, productive rhythm (i.e., patterns of sound _and_ silence) of collaboration.

While several tactics can drive company performance by instilling a sense of shared ownership among employees, perhaps the most direct is to actually share ownership with employees. Many public and private companies across industries have done just that, and studies have found that sharing ownership with employees can benefit a number of workplace performance metrics. This note summarizes the historical context from which shared corporate ownership grew, presents the three key decisions that leaders need to make when offering shared ownership (how broadly to do so, with what accountability, and with what rights), details the strategies that companies can use to share ownership with employees (e.g., profit-sharing, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), etc.), illustrates different strategies particular companies have employed, and concludes with open questions for future leaders. The goal of the note is to educate future leaders and managers on the implications of shared ownership decisions on employee engagement, and ultimately, long-term company performance. The note also provides a basic how-to user’s guide to familiarize future managers with approaches to sharing ownership more broadly with employees.

Making good hiring decisions is a critical management activity, yet many leaders just “wing it” when interviewing candidates to fill openings by having an organic conversation to assess the candidate’s fit, unknowingly subjecting the process to unconscious bias. Instead, organizations should employ structured interviewing techniques to carefully assess the skills needed for a given opening, to determine a consistent approach for fairly evaluating candidates’ skills, and ultimately to make the best possible hiring decision. This note aims to help the reader acquire the skills necessary to be an effective interviewer and to champion best-practice interviewing within his or her organization. Beginning by briefly summarizing the pitfalls of unstructured interviewing, the note proceeds to explain three types of structured interviewing techniques, the steps hiring managers should undertake to prepare for and conduct interviews, and tips for making evidence-based assessments.

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The Transparency Trap

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