At Facebook, company secrets are often shared in weekly meetings and Q&A sessions where all employees, even interns, are invited, revealed a recent article on Redcode. What’s most surprising is that almost none of that information gets leaked.
It’s all a part of Zuckerberg’s “radical transparency” leadership style. According to an article on Medium, “Radical transparency is the increasing openness about a company’s organizational processes and data.” Counterintuitively, this leadership style actually safeguards many of the insights shared at company meetings. At Facebook, leaking company secrets is viewed as a betrayal of the “Facebook family”: ““People would be pissed if someone else leaked something,” explained one former employee. “You don’t betray the family.”
Radical transparency also builds fiercely loyal employees. “That level of transparency is alarming when you see it at first,” said one former employee. “But there’s something [special] about knowing you’re getting an unfettered response.”
According to Gary Swart, who helped build the world’s largest online marketplace oDesk, transparency is the future of the work. By making employees feel like they’re part of your company and its success or failure, it brings you unfettered loyalty and commitment.
But radical transparency isn’t only beneficial for employees, it’s valuable to leaders as well. You could say that Zuckerberg gets as much out of these meeting as his employees. The meetings offer him a chance to hear new ideas and opinions from the Facebook staff. The meetings also give Zuckerberg a chance to practice his public speaking (he was a notoriously poor and awkward public speaker in the early days of Facebook, though he has improved dramatically over the years.)
While this leadership style is not unique to Facebook, (they have become industry standards in tech with companies like Google, Twitter, and Uber holding similar meetings), the celebrity status of Mark Zuckerberg and the influence that Facebook has makes it pretty good case for the multiple benefits of radically transparent leadership.
