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There was a lot of good information sharing at the AALL annual conference in Cleveland. I feel pretty seasoned as a manager and leader but I always drop in on some of the sessions focused on those topics. It is not just that you can always learn something new but, perhaps as importantly, you can be reminded of something you have forgotten. In all the discussions of communication and collaboration, I twigged to the opportunities for transparency and the role it plays. 

Transparency can be a cultural issue. There are a lot of organizations I’ve worked at where information is hoarded. Sometimes this is intentional, where people feel as though they will lose control of resources if they share information about it.  

Sometimes it is an unintended by product, particularly when an information technology team is involved, when access control overrides other business needs. This manifests itself by certain people having access or privileges that exclude others, without a business reasons. It creates information silos for no better reason than no one considered what an access-first approach means. 

Transparency can be made more difficult too in an organization where information can live in too many places. I’m experiencing that now. I work with people who save documents on SharePoint sites, on Microsoft OneDrive sites, on Google Drives, and on their Box accounts. Each site has pros and cons—why, for example, can I not search the contents of a document on a Box folder but I can on a OneDrive site?–but the largest problem is that there are too many possible locations for information. 

The power of transparency is not ensuring that everyone knows everything. Instead, what you are doing is enabling that everyone could know everything, if they wanted. Transparency often comes up when you are in a low-trust environment, where people do not share information openly. This can be due to information hoarding, where hiding is purposeful, or it can be due to people not thinking about what they are or are not sharing, or who is being included or excluded from information. 

I have seen this latter case most often when it comes to money. Financial reports can be complex and, depending on the organization, can be based on archaic reporting choices. For example, it is normal to show negative variances surrounded by parentheses: (895.00). But I’ve seen reports where all of the positive variances were in parentheses and only negative variances lacked them.  

These archaic approaches can lead financial discussions to be placed onto PowerPoint slide decks, with information extracted but not necessarily communicated clearly. It is well meaning—let’s share what we think is most valuable to the audience, rather than a lot of dense tables—but it can mean that selectivity is taken as withholding. The ideal, I think, is to have a mixture. Share the raw data as well as you can and then use a presentation method like PowerPoint to highlight the key information, using the raw data or financial report as a reference so that people can see that what you are saying is documented. Also, if questions arise, you get a chance to educate your audience on how the raw data or reference report works.

Frankly, I think people should make their default financial reports readable on their own and spend the time educating people on what they say and how to read them. One of the things I did as a courthouse law library director was to return to the default reports created by our accounting software (Intuit Quickbooks). For one thing, it used the standard income and expense layout. Anyone who had been on a governance board before would recognize it; citizens outside our organization could also use common experience to read them. By eliminating the intervening communication, you can ensure that, report to report, everyone is always talking about the same documents and building their own understanding. As soon as you start customizing reporting, you insert uncertainty.

When information isn’t shared, or is shared but in a way that is confusing, transparency can remedy some of the trust deficit. It requires people to pick through the information on their own but at least they can do that. This is what I like about Freedom of Information Act requests or other sunshine options for people finding information. The information owners may not share it but people can still attempt to understand it on their own. 

On the other, you can build almost instant trust by sharing everything you possibly can. From a manager’s standpoint, being transparent can both support better communication and reduce anxiety about lack of knowledge. People don’t always want to know all the information; mostly they don’t want to be excluded from information. 

To this end, I have defaulted to a couple of approaches: 

  • Budget and financial documents, excluding personnel costs that are tied to individuals, are saved onto shared drives. Right now we are using Box but I want to eliminate all of our Box files to place them on to SharePoint and centralize on Microsoft products (which are searchable). If anyone wants to see what the budget includes, they can see the amounts. I use a detail sheet in the budget that shows the calculations I used as well (the amount tied to a contract, for example, or the per-day calculation used for conference attendance, and so on). We also store our invoices out on the shared network space, so people can see what we are paying for things if they want to.
  • Using one, asynchronous communication tool to pose questions and answer them in an open way. We use Teams channels now (and this is what I used at my last job as well) because we can manage them on our own. We have about a dozen channels and everyone on my teams has access to all of them. Some of these channels are geared towards public services or collections or teaching, which clearly don’t apply to everyone. But anyone can look in those discussions if they want to. I have never heard a good reason to exclude team members from seeing what other people are talking about. Anything that truly needs confidential protection should be living in a different tool, with tighter control (like email). 
  • Over-sharing. After I sit in on a senior staff meeting, I try to immediately post all of the take away information to Teams. In that way, my folks can learn the information when they want to but as soon as possible. I don’t wait to see each person or until we meet. I sat in on a campus meeting with some other managers and they were complaining about information sharing: getting information from a leadership level down to the front lines. But in each case, they were trying to do it face to face, and face to face is hard to scale or do in a timely way. If communication and transparency are important, do it fast and on a platform where people can learn it as soon as they desire. Once you develop the habit, you may find you share more than before, and frankly more than people need, but it is better than the alternative.

In every organization I have worked in, interest in information has seemed to decrease over time. I have always taken this as a measurement of trust. In some cases, the interest level is pretty low to start. But sometimes, you have a person who wants to watch every morsel of information or data. If you share everything, quickly and in a way that is easy to find, you pay attention to their need. Transparency is inclusive, so even if you are trying to manage a particular communication challenge, you can solve unknown ones at the same time by making everything possible available to everyone possible.