How (25 page)

An apology in the context of business demonstrates how much of our current success is tied to our ability to be actively transparent with those to whom we are connected. Transparency builds strong synapses by increasing trust and reducing the corrosive factors that weaken them. Active transparency is not just about ameliorating liability or diffusing potentially explosive regulatory missteps, however. It puts you out ahead in a lot of situations.

INTERPERSONAL TRANSPARENCY

When I was in law school in Boston, I rowed crew with a guy I had met at Oxford, a smart guy named Sig Berven. I remember him as a fun guy, a scholar-athlete. He did well in school, was very well-rounded, but was by no means head of his class. One day, he told me the remarkable story of his admission interview for Harvard Medical School, where he was then studying. “I went into the dean’s office and sat down,” he told me. “There was so much riding on this interview, and the air in the room was stifling. The dean sat there, behind his desk, with my transcript in his hands, and said nothing for a moment or two. Finally, he looked me right in the eyes, held up my transcript, and said, ‘You know, I’ve seen better grades than this before.’ I caught my breath, looked right back at him, and said, ‘So have I . . . So have I.’ Then we kept talking.”

At the time, I didn’t understand Sig’s candor with the dean. It seemed foolhardy, given his overall level of qualification. Later, I came to recognize how extraordinary was this simple act. Sig got accepted, and he is now a distinguished assistant professor at University of California, San Francisco’s department of orthopedic surgery. He aced his interview in large part because he was simply honest when the situation and the expectations in the room screamed at him to be otherwise. He didn’t say, “Well, let me tell you, my mom was sick, so I took this semester off and my GPA dropped.” He offered no excuses, no puffery, no lies, but simply acknowledged that he, too, had seen better grades.

Most people in Sig’s situation—applying for a new position, whether in a school or with a company—portray themselves as something they are not. They succumb either to the pressure of being on the spot and feeling like they need to say the right thing to please their superior or the pressures of the old get-ahead-by-any-means-necessary culture. This is easy to understand. Nowhere in business are you more vulnerable than when you are trying to find a job. Landing a new job means forming a relationship that will have a substantial impact on your life. The majority of your waking hours will be spent there, a hefty percentage of your physical and mental abilities will be applied to its endeavors, the money that supports the rest of your life activities will flow from there, and the time you spend there will be part of your path through life toward the goal of whatever your eventual success will be. It’s a little like marrying an elephant: You must trust them enough to climb into their back pocket, but you can only hope that they don’t forget you are there and sit down on you. The wrong choice could push you off the success track. An environment that stifles creativity and growth could hold you back from reaching your full potential. A bad relationship could burn valuable bridges or create an indelible blot on your work history (business doesn’t believe in no-fault divorce, and elephants have long memories). It’s a process fraught with risk and reward, and even the most talented and in-demand candidates feel vulnerable.

In the days before hypertransparency, the hiring process could be described as a carefully orchestrated dance between company and recruit, each trying to control and mete out information about themselves in a way that achieved their desired outcome. Interviewees would construct an image of themselves on paper in the form of a resume, and then dress themselves up and put their best face forward, highlighting their strengths while hoping that their weaknesses were well hidden. Many simply make things up. A recent
New York Times
Job Market research team study indicates that an astounding 89 percent of job seekers fudge their resumes. Typical embellishments include exaggerated job responsibilities, falsified employment dates, and manufactured reasons for leaving a former employer.
³⁷
According to a recent article in
Time
magazine, InfoLink Screening Services, a company that performs background checks on potential hires, estimates that 14 percent of applicants lie about their education. Organizations, in turn, would do their own dance, presenting their greatest successes and painting a picture they hope will seduce the recruit.
³⁸

These sorts of common obfuscations no longer fly in a world where almost everything you say can be easily verified. Information technology has driven down the cost of uncovering applicant fabrications to almost nothing. Fully 96 percent of businesses now routinely perform background checks on potential employees. The third-party screening industry, just a handful of firms in the mid-1990s, in 2007 numbers around 700 companies doing $2 billion worth of business per year. On the other side of the coin, almost any candidate can search blogs and message boards and chat rooms, look deep within an organization, and gain accurate information about not only its prospects, but what it is like to work there day to day.

Success in any business relationship flows from the alignment of the parties involved. The more closely an organization and recruit share the same vision for the future, the more productive and fulfilling that relationship will be. In the new, more vulnerable world of business, where innovation and growth spring from the leadership of every stakeholder, achieving synchronicity, alignment, and common goals can cement a relationship that creates enormous value for both parties. So let us ask ourselves a question: On what vision can we truly align? Job description? Salary? Benefits? Production goals? Can we truly align in a way that inspires us to achieve at our highest levels on the basis of these measures of success?

Paradoxically,
success
is the worst possible answer. People who seek their next job on the basis of these external measures stay in a company’s foxhole only as long as their career goals and aspirations stay in line with what’s happening to the company. Their alignment is coincidental, not deep. They continue to work hard for the company’s mission only as long as the mission works for their resume. Success, in this way, is a WHAT, and in any business journey, the WHATS will change. If, though, you see your career decisions as fueled by the desire to build a legacy, to construct and provide values to others—in short, to do something
significant
—then you begin to open the doors to the possibility of a deeper form of alignment, alignment on HOW. People and companies align on values, on the HOWS of pursuing a goal, not on personal success or the success of the effort. Values are inspirational, and last long after short-term WHATS expire. Long-term alignment can best be achieved when individual and organization align and mutually embrace the HOWS that drive the enterprise. According to a Watson Wyatt Worldwide WorkUSA study, companies whose employees understand and embrace the corporate mission, goals, and values enjoy a 29 percent greater return than other firms.
³⁹

That’s the paradox of success. You can achieve it only by pursuing something greater:
significance
.

If thriving in the workplace flows from close alignment with the HOWS of the organization you work for, then you must bring yourself to the table in a way that lets them see who you truly are. At his Harvard interview, Sig understood instinctively what most of us need to learn: interpersonal transparency is the best way to present yourself authentically to the world. Sig won that place in their program in part because at the moment of truth, he was able to present himself transparently. His honesty allowed Harvard to see the whole person, a person of confidence and personal integrity, despite the fact that his grades were so-so by their standards. I’ve personally interviewed dozens of high-level candidates for positions at LRN, and I often ask people to share with me something they consider a weakness. Too many times, I hear something like “I care too much” or “I’m a workaholic,” pat interview answers that are designed to be strengths masquerading as weaknesses. Seldom do I hear an honest appraisal of skills that need improving. When I do, it makes an impression. In our transparent age, there has never been a better time to resist the pressure to cut corners and shade the truth, not only because you will probably be caught, but because transparency is now understood as the way to accountability, strength, and mutual understanding. You no longer need to have a Master of the Universe costume on. Trying to be Superman, or all things to all people, no longer defines strength. Hiding weakness, like controlling information, swims against the current of business in a transparent age.

There has never been a better time to turn your weaknesses into strengths, like Sig did, because strength now comes with this type of vulnerability. Instead of puffing yourself up in an interview or trying to be something you are not, what if you say, “I’m actually not so good at these two things, but I am pretty good at these other two things.” Are you more likely to get a job at that company? Employers are looking for skill sets, yes, but more importantly they are looking for someone who can align with their goals. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, a leading values-based company, said in a recent interview on NPR’s
Marketplace
, “When we hire employees, we look for a passion. That passion tells me that they’re alive, and there is potential there.”
⁴⁰
As information-based job skills become increasingly transferable between industries and job descriptions, companies looking for the best talent put far less emphasis on specific expertise—a candidates WHATS—and far more on their HOWS. A potential employer, hearing you being candid, thinks, “Wow, this candidate really seems to know herself and what she can bring to the table. I can work with someone who is self-aware.”

SIG, DON’T ZAG

It is no longer possible to make and sustain a Wave by telling the people sitting next to you that you’ll pay them to participate, telling the people two rows back that you think it will help the team win, and telling the little guy in front of you that you’ll punch him if he doesn’t stand up. The free flow of information creates a dangerous playing field for those whose game is to shade the truth. When people are connected—when they can share notes and communicate horizontally among themselves—the ability to spin and manipulate information disappears. Co-workers, customers, suppliers, and strategic partners are all sitting in the same stadium with you, integrally connected. Information becomes powerful when you get everybody on the same page with you, and it is the
most
powerful thing if you spread a consistent message to more and more people. The only way to make that powerful Wave that starts in one place and then flows throughout the stadium in a self-sustaining way is to get everyone you can reach directly aligned in a common goal. In a horizontal, connected world nothing achieves alignment and common purpose faster then active transparency. In fact, without it, they are almost impossible to achieve.

Transparency in its active form has a remarkable effect on people. It calls them out to meet you on the plane of openness, it speeds and encourages trust and collaboration, and—here’s the surprising part—it is incredibly disarming. I’m talking about something greater than just telling the truth. Rather, the new conditions of the world can become a competitive edge if you aggressively embrace transparency in its verb form,
to be transparent
. If business is no longer war, then you need to practice skills that take the war out of business. That’s what makes active transparency so effective. As we have seen, active vulnerability with others creates the conditions in which they can be vulnerable with you, and trust creates trust, on a biological and an organizational level, with mutually beneficial results. Vulnerability, in this way, is actually strength.

Last year, I had a “Sig moment.” I was having a business dinner with Alan Spoon, a managing general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in growth companies around the world, and former president of the Washington Post Company. He was interested in investing in LRN, and I was interested in him becoming part of the team. During the meal, Alan asked me frankly what my board thought of a certain aspect of my performance. Without hesitation (thank you, Sig!) I found myself saying, “I think they’d give me a pretty low grade; I don’t know—C-minus.”

He was clearly very surprised.

I didn’t tell him that because he would have found me out; I was up-front with him because I was trying to inspire him to join in with me, to see that I understood the work ahead and could be honest about what’s working and what’s not. I employed the power of transparency toward creating a more intimate collaboration, toward getting aligned faster. Any truth I shaded was going be something we’d have to talk about later, something that would undermine the trust in our future dealings, and something that would stifle any inspiration for him to be part of what I’m trying to do—ever. I could have let him take six months to drill down to the truth, but by just putting it out there I extended a powerful invitation. This worked to my advantage in the long term.

Some months later, Alan was at a meeting also attended by some members of my board. He called me soon after. He had indeed quizzed them about the very subject that I had opened up to him about, he told me, and was even more impressed with my transparency as a result. The board was less critical of me that I was. Now, you can imagine someone playing games with this. The Machiavellian schemer in us could say, “Set him up. Tell him something negative because you know he’ll get something rosy when he checks.” But trust me on this:
You don’t want to do the right thing for the wrong reasons
. It will inevitably backfire later. People sense when you are trying to game them or the system, and they react with suspicion. The power in this sort of candor lies precisely in its guilelessness. You can imagine how much more negatively someone will react if they’ve been lulled into a sense of security and trust by guile and subterfuge. From that place, there is no going back. “Fool me once, shame on you,” the old maxim goes. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” To tell a potential investor “You know, the board would give me a low grade on that” is a dark point to make. But when you’re aware of the power of honesty and transparency, you get inspired to be more honest.