How can Business Coaches help leaders build a culture of transparency?

My belief is organisations thrive when the culture is great. It's easy to say but hard to do. Culture is defined by behaviours and behaviours are defined by "how people act when no one is looking." So for a leader and company to build transparency, a focus on culture is needed. The key attribute is trust. Without trust, leadership is authoritative or worse micromanagement. Transparency relies on values and being true to ones word. It is easy for leaders to say they are transparent but only share what they want people to know. This is a misnomer. Rather, be open with your teams, share the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. Trust those around you and in return transparency can exist. If you only use it when it suits you, game over.

Leaders should be brave enough to accept feedback and input from their team, no matter how open honest and confronting. Once they know they can tell it how they see it without repurcussions you will see more transparancy.

Business coaches guide leaders in cultivating transparency by assessing current levels, defining a vision, developing strategies, and enhancing communication skills. This fosters trust, open dialogue, and shared responsibility, leading to increased employee engagement, innovation, and organizational growth. Embracing transparency with business coaches' support can create a thriving organizational culture.

We celebrate mistakes once every month to 6 weeks for 2 reasons. To learn from them ( presentations by every cell) but more importantly to let everyone know it’s ok to make a small goof, bring it out immediately as we r a team to help solve it quickly… remove the fear and see WOW happen!

The unclear vision and goals can take leaders to an unknown path that doesn't bring any success. When you know your clear "WHY," it can provide a clear vision and goal that can be aligned with the right path, strategy, and process to achieve that success and goals. We can focus on building a roadmap that aligns goals and success with the timeline and strategies that create transparency among the team, investors, and founders.

Coaches can help business leaders see their employees as key stakeholders of the business, not just a cost center. This leads to tangible goals around staff education that makes transparency possible. Education is key so that leadership feels safe sharing more—knowing that employees have the context and knowledge to process what’s going on and help tackle the businesses biggest challenges.

A valuable technique to enhance transparency in a leader's thought process is the Walt Disney Method. Here's how it works: When a leader faces challenges or decisions with a cloudy vision, they step into four distinct characters - the Neutral, the Critiquer, the Objective, and the Visionary. This approach allows each facet of their thinking to express its perspective. By the end of the exercise, all characters have shared their insights, enabling the leader to improve their decision-making skills and promote transparency.

Developing the skills and behaviors of a vision based leader is critical to the success of any organization. This involves powerfully communicating the vision of a company, ensuring everyone understands why the vision matters, and acknowledging each leader’s part in making that vision a reality. Moving a vision from something written on an organization’s walls to something that is actually lived is where the behaviors associated with the vision become crucial.

Change starts with us. In order to see a change in team skills and behaviours, it's essential that teams see leaders working on themselves too. Setting an example of the importance of working towards self-improvement gives others on your teams permission to not be perfect. Because no-one is perfect, and no-one ever will be. We are in a constant state of self-development and accepting this opens us up to more opportunities to build skills and improve the workplace.

The less leaders try to prove themselves the more people trust them. We need to focus less on maintaining an image (defensive behaviour) and more on open engagement, efficient execution, & mutual learning. Certainty is one of the weakest positions in life. Curiosity is the most powerful! As a leadership coach/consultant I bring my curiosity to their certainty and ask questions that create new perspectives, insights and possibilities.

Possible ways to monitor that helped my clients in the past: 1) 360-Degree Feedback: Coaches can facilitate feedback sessions where leaders receive insights from their peers, subordinates, and superiors. This not only helps leaders understand their transparency but also promotes a culture of open communication and mutual respect. 2) Trust-Building Workshops: Coaches design trust-building exercises and workshops for teams. These activities promote trust, which is a cornerstone of transparency, enabling employees to feel safe expressing their thoughts and ideas.

Transparency is not simply achieved by overnight fixes, but through long-term structured cultural change programmes. This is where business coaching is essential, as you cannot see the sea you swim in, or the air you breathe. You need an independent perspective to build such programmes, and one which can go beyond management theories into practical and applied advice and wisdom.

This is a booby trapped question. It's not the coach's role to help establish anything in the culture. That's the executive's role. All the considerations of clarity and vision and things of that nature, fit into the realm of Consulting, not coaching. A savvy coach will engage with the leader to find their own wisdom and power, to tap their genius and their team's genius, and to solve for the problem. Anything mechanical that the coach does is squarely in the realm of Consulting. Consulting is fabulous, but it serves a different purpose, and hardly ever cultivates the capacity of the leader as well as coaching does.

It’s a simple concept - retain a need to know basis of knowledge sharing at the relevant levels of management and or teams - always explain the “why”, the end game and the journey to get there . Provide relevant updates and don’t over dramatise the situation or the news

The bottom line. Training will teach your team things...but nothing will change. Coaching makes change happen and stick. Also, coaching is a habit...not an initiative. Make sure your leaders are authentically using this. Lip-service will damage coaching.