Get Clear About Transparency at Your Organization Before You Promise It

A lot of businesses like to throw around the word transparency - whether it is in their core values, how they talk to their team or clients, or even how they operate. But if transparency hasn’t been defined for your specific company, you can get caught off guard by an employee asking what money another employee makes, a client asking exactly what you did to get results, or even when questions come up about who sees the company’s financials. Because to those people asking, that is what transparency meant to them - and you didn’t give them any other way to think about it. That’s when things can get hairy. 

There's often a wide spread between what executives mean when they say transparency, what they do, and what employees or clients think it should mean. And that dissonance can break trust, fast - which is especially hard when trust is one of the hardest things to earn, especially in professional services. Transparency feels like a promise you make to others - that you will share, show, or talk about things (or anything) that comes up. And when you suddenly don’t share comp or fully disclose your “secret sauce” to getting results, that feels like a broken promise. 

It might feel weird, but the solution is to treat transparency as a policy, not a term to throw around lightly. Get clear on what it means and share that with everyone you interact with, in their context. Make sure people know what it means, so they are surprised when you don’t share something - or happy when you do, because you actually met the definition you set. 

Define What Transparency Actually Means to Your Business

Transparency lives on a spectrum, and you need to decide exactly where your firm sits before you talk about it. Here are the major areas to discuss:

- Financial performance — Revenue, margin, whether you hit the quarter, cash position

- Business risks — A client on the verge of churning, an industry red flag, a pending business pivot

- Compensation and Promotion — Individual salaries, the logic behind raises, owner pay, logic behind promotions

- Secret sauce — What goes into the work you deliver and clients pay for - methodology, platforms, AI/automations

For each one, the exercise is simple and a little uncomfortable: Who gets to know about this at what level of depth?

You are maybe a single owner, or have a partnership group. Either way, there are more employees, clients, and vendors than you, and they will have their own questions around transparency. You can’t imagine what people will come up with to ask under that banner. And for many, "transparency" implicitly means knowing everything. For employees - they usually want to know what happens with all the money. For clients, they want to know how you do what they are paying for - to either make sure you are doing it how they want/need, or maybe even to figure out how to do it themselves. Most owners have zero intention of opening ANY of those books, and that's completely legitimate. But if you never say so, you've left the door open, and someone will eventually walk through it. And they’ll call you on it when you don’t share. 

So you first need to define what you are going to share and with whom. That might mean that you give firm-wide revenue numbers to senior leaders only, or that you publish pay bands for roles but not individual salaries. Or that you will disclose what platforms you use, but now how you use them, to your clients. It’s the start of a real definition, with boundaries, of what people can expect to know and who can expect to know it. 

Decide What You'll Share — and How Often

Once you've defined what, and who, the next question is how often.

How consistently you share matters as much as what you share. A one-time "state of the company" reveal because morale dipped reads as performative. A regular update on company performance at every full company meeting (no matter the news) is investment in a habit of transparency. 

And you may already have some of these opportunities in-motion, so no it doesn’t have to be another meeting on the calendar. Look to use your all-hands, quarterly business review, or even your company newsletter. This cuts down on anticipation - “when might we hear about this” and gives a predictable time to find out a set slate of information. It can also help combat people creating their own narrative about performance, goals, or outlooks. 

Transparency isn't an event, it's a cadence. Sporadic sharing can be interpreted as suspicious, but consistent sharing -  good news and bad - shows character. 

Don’t Forget to Define Transparency for Clients, Vendors, and Partners

Here's the part agency owners forget. If "transparency" is part of your external brand - and for a lot of professional services firms, it's a headline selling point - then you owe your clients the same defined promise you owe your team.

An unclear definition of transparency to a client is just as risky as an undefined promise to an employee. Maybe riskier, because they're paying you.

Places this can show up:

1. How the work actually gets delivered. Does your client know which senior person is on their account versus who's actually doing the work day to day?

2. Subcontractors and vendors. If part of the deliverable is produced by a freelancer or a partner shop, does the client know? Do they need to?

3. AI usage. This is the big one, and it's moving fast. Is AI in your workflow? Where? Is that strategy deck client-facing AI-assisted, or is a human doing the thinking? "We use AI" and "we use AI to speed up research so our strategists spend more time on your strategy" land very differently. One of those is a value prop, the other leaves you open to some uncomfortable questions.

4. What happens when you mess up. It happens, there’s humans on the team and humans make mistakes. So when you mess up something - send the wrong file to the wrong person, run the wrong create, get a decimal in the wrong place - how in-depth do you go in explaining and how do you make-good with the client?

You don't have to disclose every part of your workflow. But you do have to decide what you'll tell clients, proactively, before they ask - because finding out later, on their own, is how a good relationship can start to sour. 

How to Create a Real Transparency Standard

So if transparency is practice you want at your firm, you have to be intentional around its definition and practice. Here’s how to get started:

1. Write it down in plain language. Before the word is breathed in a group setting, write it down. It can start with one page: what you share, with whom, how often. If you can't be clear about these pieces, it isn’t yet a standard and keep working at it. 

2. Pressure-test it against the ugly scenarios. Walk your definition through a layoff. A badly missed target. A client project that went sideways. Does the definition still hold when it's bad news? If it collapses the moment things get hard, rewrite it now - not in the middle of the crisis.

3. Communicate the "why" before the "what." Lead with the purpose and why of the definition - "we want you to trust the numbers we give you, so here's what we'll always share" - before the mechanics.

4. Use the cadence you already have. Don't build a new ritual. Bolt what you share in the name of transparency onto a meeting or communication that is already established with your team or client. That can help weave transparency in as a practice, not a special bulletin. 

5. Review it as you scale. What "transparent" means at $2M is different at $5M, and different again at $15M. More layers, more people who never sat in a room with you, more distance between your intentions and their experience. Revisit the definition at each threshold.

Lastly, we also recommend that before finalizing your definition, ask your team what they think transparency means here. You may be surprised how far your assumptions are from theirs. That gap is worth identifying and weaving into his work. 

The firms that get this right are the ones that do the work to clearly define, articulate, and practice transparency in the context of what it means to their business. They're the ones whose people - and clients - can predict exactly what they'll learn, and when because it has been laid out for them. 

If you want a framework for defining and rolling it what transparency means at your organization, internally and externally, talk to prism+spire about building the leadership operating system that makes it stick.