Transparency in a Time of Physical Estrangement
One of our leadership values at Andover Newton is transparency, because when leaders are open with students about why they are doing what they are doing, we students can learn from this modeling. That being said, not everything is for everyone to know at every moment. Timing is important. How does a leader balance transparency in leadership with the reality that some information, projects, and processes need time to develop and percolate internally before being shared with the wider community? -Tara Humphries, candidate for the Andover Newton diploma, Yale Divinity School Master of Divinity, and Unitarian Universalist ministry
You design the plane. While building the plane. While flying the plane. While simultaneously telling everyone on the plane and on the ground what it is you’re doing, every second along the way.
The first part of the sentence above is a familiar metaphor for leadership amidst uncertainty in a liminal time. The second part I made up, but to me, it’s just as true. Transparency matters for strengthening trust between leaders and their communities, and trust is both inherently good and also essential for the success of anything new leaders might try.
I have long understood the importance of transparency. As Tara mentions, it’s one of the core values of Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School. I’ve assigned books like Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter’s Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), which instructs leaders on how to bring communities along through communication rather than expecting people to play follow-the-leader.
Previously, I’ve written about how my own leadership transparency was tested by our seminary’s process of affiliating with Yale University. When the idea of the affiliation was new, no one could know about it for two reasons: first, we weren’t allowed to discuss negotiations due to nondisclosure agreements (that was the easy part). Second, we wanted to be confident the idea had a snowball’s chance in… well, we didn’t want to disrupt our whole community over a flash in the pan. Those judgment calls were harder. What does “ready” even look like with an idea so complex, and where constituent relations aren’t just a dimension of the work, but are everything?
During these Covid-19 days, which might be waning but are also starting to feel unbearably long, my commitment to transparency is being tested yet again, but for a different reason. We never, ever see one another. That means the only transparency possible is the hyper-intentional kind: write about it and share it using technology, talk about it in a Zoom meeting or… nope, no third option; those are it. Yikes.
One year into the pandemic, I am only beginning to realize how much our community used to rely on running into each other, seeing each other in different kinds of spaces, and communicating passively rather than actively. Outside the Andover Newton offices on a quadrangle hardly anyone inhabits is a beautiful bulletin board with photographs of our community’s student leaders. We tried to get the same information up onto the Web, but did we work to drive traffic to that section of the site? Probably not hard enough.
So much communications work happened off-campus at conferences and meetings, and on-campus over lunch in the refectory and coffee in the common room. Heck, I carried out a lot of diplomacy with colleagues by virtue of the fact that I had to walk by a dozen offices to get to the restroom when on-campus, and I’m a coffee drinker.
To answer to Tara’s question, which first came up in meeting of Andover Newton’s Student Steering Committee, I first must name obstacles to transparency: (1) not enough outlets, (2) not enough bandwidth, and (3) respect for process.
The first two obstacles are related. Just like the outlets in our houses have both a limited number of plugs and a limited number of volts they can emit, we could send hourly messages about all that’s happening in our community, but would our constituents have the attention span to read them? Of course not. Covid has taken away from us the best kind of transparency: the subliminal communication that happens through observation and doesn’t take up conscious space in our capacity-delimited minds.
The third (understandable and even positive) obstacle, respect for process, also requires some rethinking during this time of physical distancing. The “old rules” of sequencing communication had become so familiar to me as to feel rote. For instance, we never talk publicly about confidential HR decisions or individual student matters. We make sure those who share governance (in the case of a school, that would be faculty, administration, and board; in a locally governed church that would be lay leaders and staff) are in the loop and onboard before disseminating information further. We sort out money and legal matters associated with a new initiative before going public, as they’re the most likely reasons an otherwise good idea might turn out to be impossible.
These “old rules” require a great deal of time and attention, and Covid-19 has forced us to make many decisions quickly, in real time. The first month or two of the pandemic, we were in emergency mode, with leaders communicating all the time. But none of us can stay in emergency mode forever, and certainly not a whole year. My own determination to design, build, fly, and report out constantly from the plane started flagging mid-fall. Thank God I work with a team that’s attuned to what it is our constituents want and need to know, so I don’t have to keep all my portals open to the world, 24/7.
Andover Newton announced we were selling our campus and relocating on November 13, 2015, at noon. Before that point, the only groups that knew what was happening were the Andover Newton faculty and trustees, and our negotiating partners at Yale. My colleagues and I had a spreadsheet with 35 different constituents and constituent groups listed. For each group, we had an information-sharing strategy to get them all the news at the exact same time.
Why? Because we knew that many people would be upset — heck, we were upset — and one of the first things that sends upset people over the edge is anger that they didn’t find out first. We wanted to keep the temperature down low enough that we’d be able to bring our community along and eventually come to terms with the realities we were facing, and come to understand if not agree with the reasons why relocating seemed our best option.
Covid-19 is a different kind of crisis. First of all, unlike the crisis of having to sell a campus and move a school, it’s affecting the whole world. I’d say that was a relief it it weren’t for how much more awful it is that everyone is suffering. Second, that which we’re trying to communicate isn’t a major change, it’s a different version of business as usual. The old rules still apply, such as the rule that the governing entities really do need to be in the loop before wider communication takes place. But we haven’t yet figured out the new transparency rules of this strange season, when connections between individuals and their communities are thin due to physical estrangement.
Between now and the advent of new rules, we must try to improve systems. We must also be nice to ourselves, even when others aren’t so nice when they find out late about something for which they should have been consulted. We don’t have that many outlets, and even if we did, our constituents have limited bandwidth… and none of us is going to get it right every time.
My predecessor Martin used to keep a post-it note under his computer monitor that said, “Who else needs to know about this?” I have tricks too, such as always cc’ing people on emails if I’ve mentioned their name in it. And of course, there’s this ‘blog. I write it for the sake of my own transparency, with the hope that my efforts to describe what it’s like to keep our community’s beautiful little plane in the air help leaders, struggling like me, to find new ideas and feel less alone.
