Transparency Kills Drama: The Lesson I Learned the Hard Way
In my early childhood, I lived with my parents and grandparents in the same house as this was common in Romania at the time. My grandfather would pick me up from kindergarten and when we arrived home, he usually gave me time to play until my parents got home from work.
One day, my grandpa had to leave to run some errands. When he left, I was in the yard playing with my ball while my grandma was inside cooking. As I was shooting the ball at my imaginary goal post, I accidentally broke one of our outdoor light fixtures. When my dad arrived home, he asked what happened. I told him I had no idea and after a few seconds of pause he said, “Well, I bet grandpa must have broken it.” I started to feel nervous, but I agreed that must have been what happened.
As each day passed, I began feeling more and more miserable. I not only felt guilty for breaking the light, but also lying and blaming my grandpa for something he hadn’t done. After a few days of misery, I went to my dad and told him the truth. As soon as I was done, he looked at me knowingly and told me that he assumed it was me but wanted to give me a chance to tell the truth.
After years, I realized why my dad had approached the situation in this way. Of course, he had realized that chances were close to zero for grandpa to smash that light without saying anything. Yet he decided this would be a good lesson in truth and accountability — and it was a damn good one. I learned quickly that it’s one thing to make a mistake, and it’s totally different to keep secrets and lie. Mistakes are a normal part of the human condition, and though I thought lying was going to protect me from the consequences, it actually made me feel worse. My parents, kind and thoughtful as they were, realized that the pain of holding in the truth was punishment enough. I had learned my lesson and I carried it with me into adulthood.
Even as a kid, I was quite pragmatic and direct. As an adult I find being straightforward is what comes most easily to me. I struggle with small talk when it is being used as a way to avoid the topic at hand. If I had to describe my problem-solving process it would be as follows: define the problem, openly discuss each person’s opinions and then decide together, in the most democratic way possible, what the next right step should be. Therefore, when people that I collaborate with — it doesn’t really matter if it’s professionally or personally — hide things or aren’t clear in a way that jeopardizes reaching the agreed objective, I feel frustrated. The process I described feels like it is deeply embedded in my DNA and for a long time it caused me to accumulate a lot of resentment. I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t direct all the time. There were moments when I thought I was this perfect honest person and everyone around me was hiding stuff from me. As my self-awareness grew, I began to see that it was my behavior that led to a lack of transparency in others. In some situations, people avoided being transparent with me because I was a lousy listener and incredibly stubborn. It was easier for people to respond with what I viewed as B.S. then deal with having a direct conversation with me. I also realized that there were times when I had trouble expressing accurately what I was thinking. In this case, it was I who lacked the skill to be transparent.
I met Scott in 2014, a year after I was hired at a global manufacturing company and I was feeling professionally strangled. It appeared to me that I had been placed in the line of fire, so to speak, as the head of what seemed to be doomed projects. He helped me get out of that role, which wasn’t working and brought me onto his team. From the very beginning, I sensed that we had similar professional philosophies. We believed that open collaboration was the key to a healthy and productive business environment. Throughout the three years we worked together, we began to experiment with this, attempting to be the most collaborative versions of ourselves. In this process we stumbled upon the importance of transparency. We realized collaboration was impossible without it. Scott, as a man from the American South, had many witticisms. After our aha moment with transparency, he began to say, “Transparency Kills Drama”.
Our efforts to increase collaboration through transparency were working. We felt deep satisfaction when we could see colleagues begin to change their own communication styles, even some of the most vehemently calculated members of our team. It turns out that transparency is a group project and it is hard to remain secretive in the face of clear and honest communication.
Scott and I both left the company at the end of 2016. We parted ways, taking different opportunities but we both continued to pursue our experiment. We continued trying to build open and transparent environments at our respective jobs. After the pandemic, we reconnected. What started as a catch-up gradually became weekly meetings and countless WhatsApp messages as we tried to explore why the collaboration experiment we’ve done working together paid off and how we could share it. We started from the beginning: that collaboration is key, because pretty much everything we do as humans on this planet is either a form of collaboration, or a result of it. We started breaking things down to understand what are the ingredients that allow for collaboration and under what conditions do people collaborate the best. We came up with a set of principles that help. We finally understood something we had learned separately, that in order to live by these principles one had to turn inward and build self-awareness. Only then could we begin to be truly transparent and transparency is the jumping off point.
