Transparency Training

If you want to tap into the full potential of agile and lean teams to sustainably deliver value, you need to give them all information they require to make smart decisions. As a manager, how can you determine what information is relevant to somebody else’s decision making and make sure they get access to it?

Several successful companies eliminated need-to-know policies and are making all all information they have accessible to all employees. They found that full transparency is a key ingredient to a new kind of company culture that facilitates faster and better decisions, creates better products, fosters alignment as well as innovation, increases employee collaboration, motivation and retention and also greatly helps with recruiting new talent.

For an executive or manager it’s imperative to gain insights into how transparency will help in their areas of responsibility. As new levels of transparency come with a different set of responsibilities and challenges, leaders need to acquire new mental models and new tools to help them and their teams deal with resistances and successfully navigate towards greater transparency.

However, with transparency (as with agile in general), there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so every company needs to discover what they need and how to go about implementing it.

In addition to that, we rarely start on a blank slate, we have an existing company culture we need to softly tilt towards more transparency before we can even attempt todo the full monty.

In the first part of the workshop we will explore what is possible looking at existing transparent organizations, explore different aspects of transparency (e.g. benefits, , what can we make transparent, tools we can use, resistances), and experiment hands-on with some models and activities that help companies with becoming more transparent.

The second half of the workshop is dedicated to the toughest transparency issue out there: open salaries. We will begin with exploring real-world examples, the benefits of open salaries and the current culture around salaries/compensation. Thus prepared we will dive into a design thinking session to create culture hacks or solutions for real-world examples from participants’ companies.

The workshop is targeted at anyone who wants their company to become more transparent, a high diversity in participants i.e. people from different backgrounds and with different levels of experience will make for a more interesting experience and add to the value of all participants.

Participants will take away insights, models and tools to help their companies move towards a culture of transparency, as well as a list of resources for further study. Both a week and a month after the conference participants can join a Google Hangout to discuss their experiences with transparency at their workplace.