Keeping it Real

It’s impossible to overstate how important appropriate transparency is to healthy leadership. You cannot lead if you don’t have trust.

In this episode, I will discuss three ways transparency can build up your team and improve your effectiveness as a leader.

1. Transparency is a suspicion eliminator. Suspicion is organizational cancer. If you lose trust, you lose your ability to lead. It can take years to build trust, but it only takes a moment of suspicion to destroy it. Any level of perceived hypocrisy, inconsistency or selfish motives create suspicion.

2. Transparency is a trust builder. The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority. There is a difference between an authoritative boss and a trust-building leader. A boss directs with authority, but a leader inspires with trust. The currency of influence is trust. Just because you have a title doesn’t mean you have trust.

3. Transparency is a relational unifier. This is one of the biggest missed opportunities for some leaders. They wrongly believe that they will be more loved if they are strong, wise and always confident. But the reality is people love you more when you are a person, not just an authority figure.

Above all else, to be truthful and transparent with others, you must be truthful and transparent with yourself. People don’t want to follow an organization. They want to follow a person.

Remember, you don’t have to know it all to be a great leader! Be yourself. People would rather follow a leader who is always real than one who is always right.