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.

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.

Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | October 2015 (Revised February 2020)

Trouble at Tessei

Ethan Bernstein and Ryan Buell

In 2005, Teruo Yabe is asked to revive Tessei, the 669-person JR-East subsidiary responsible for cleaning its Shinkansen ("bullet") trains. Operational mistakes, customer complaints, safety issues, and employee turnover are at or near all-time highs, even as the demands on Tessei continued to grow.

Given previous leaders' failed attempts to fix Tessei's problems with increased managerial monitoring and controls, Yabe seeks a creative approach to overcome the motivation, capability, and coordination challenges facing his organization. Like many contemporary leaders, he selects transparency as his tool. He is, however, unique in adopting a highly nuanced approach to implementing transparency. In the process, he not only leads a fantastic organizational turnaround but even helps to make otherwise "dirty" work more meaningful for Tessei front-line employees. The case therefore presents students, particularly in leadership, organizational behavior, operations management, and service operations courses, with an opportunity to think through how a well-crafted transparency strategy can act as a powerful leadership tool.

Keywords: service operations; service management; employee engagement; employee motivation; leadership and managing people; leadership; quality improvement; efficiency; Japan; operational transparency; employee coordination; transparency; Leadership; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Employees; Quality; Transportation Industry; Japan;

Citation:

Bernstein, Ethan, and Ryan Buell. "Trouble at Tessei." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 616-031, October 2015. (Revised February 2020.) View Details

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