Should Honesty be the Policy in Your Office?

Confusing transparency with integrity and honesty is a recipe for disaster.

Consider this scenario: A Fortune 20 company division set up a Web-based calendar management portal to schedule and coordinate meetings. It was a traditionally hierarchical organisation, so the system permitted higher-ups to schedule time on an employee’s calendar if it appeared open. An increasingly irritated subculture of overscheduled subordinates soon took to scheduling fake meetings to prevent their superiors from booking their time.

Their bosses – no dummies! – discovered this subterfuge. The hardliners wanted the option to override their subordinates’ schedules. A slightly kinder and gentler executive group proposed calling out the tricksters by sending e-mails to the people supposedly participating in the faux meetings.

The confrontations and countermeasures seem destined to escalate. Who’s the truly offending party here: the wily subordinates? The preemptory bosses? Or the software designers who devised a system that made conflict inevitable?

The perception that techno-transparency’s benefits inherently outweigh its costs in the workplace is a commonly held belief, but it is not an empirical fact. Some of our most difficult relationships involve the people we work with every day.

Will greater transparency prove the best approach to dealing with that reality? Innovations that incentivize people to tell a little white lie deserve careful handling, not viral promotion.

Many executives believe that transparency makes organisations more egalitarian and flat, but it actually just makes the asymmetries of power and hierarchy more visible. Knowledge isn’t power; the ability to act on knowledge is.

The people at the top of the pyramid tend to have greater abilities to act than those at the bottom. After all, job applicants are less likely to be deterred by a prospective manager’s unflattering Facebook photograph or intemperate blog comment than a boss would be in the face of the same evidence from an applicant.

Is there a solution to these issues? Of course not. Such conflicts are intrinsic to the human condition, and thus to organizations.

Technology simply illuminates them in unusual ways. To better deal with these conflicts, managers should seek the same transparency they wish to impose by simply asking people what they need to know instead.

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate