Transparency?

If you are like countless companies these days, you likely have some sort of corporate mission, vision and value statements.  Somewhere in your values, many also profess a fondness for communicating openly, honestly and transparently.  If this sounds familiar, then the following couple of points are for you:

It takes a different approach to acquire technical skills than cultural change
Many companies attempt to approach cultural change, or culture in general, like they are teaching math in the fifth grade.  Something like: "Here is how this works and has worked for everyone forever, do this over-and-over and you will become proficient.  That is all."  Can you imagine changing the mindset (and culture) of an organization in the same way?  If you have, you've likely learned the hard way that culture change is a little more dynamic.  For a good primer on the pitfalls of cultural change, check out Michael Beer's book "High Commitment, High Performance" and his story from Becton Dickinson.  In short, culture change requires more than rote learning and dictating the new "rules of the road", it has to also involve lots of personal, two-way communication.

Change is as hard for the teacher as it is for the student
Understanding why someone is not "on the same page as you" demands understanding why they operate the way they do today.  Perhaps you are the latest in a long line of so-called managers with your own flavor on how the company can be guaranteed success only for the manager to be disappointed and ultimately replaced.  Maybe your culture is created from refugees from competitors who see your firm as a place where they all share a similar set of convictions that are different from that other competitor.  Facilitating this change means being flexible and literally treating cultural transition as a one-on-one process whereby people on the team may all be in different places at different times.

Being transparent is hard work but it is the future
Many leaders mistake transparency as the equivalent of a one-way mirror:  they want their team to be completely open with them but the same level of communication is not reciprocal.  This will never work - people see through it, believe it is as disingenuous as it appears when you read it on this blog and actively and silently rebel at every opportunity.  With the public sector already publishing much of its' information through freedom of information rules and technology increasingly making information ecumenical and immediate.  Transparency is the future.

No one said it was easy, but there is a way to find the cultural and business results that you want.  Commit to communication and transparency both up-and-down in the organization and you will find a team that understands why actions are being taken and is more aligned with the decisions.