What transparency actually gives people

It's not about telling everyone everything. It's about what happens when people can finally see where they fit.

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For too much of my career, I worked with leaders who operated on a strict need-to-know basis. The message that came down was some version of: "Leadership wants x. I'm not sure why. Can you just figure out a way to do it?"

I may have understood the task, but I had no idea what I was actually solving for. And without that, I couldn't bring anything to the table beyond compliance.

What those leaders probably saw was someone doing her job. What they couldn't see — because the system they'd built didn't allow for it — was everything I wasn't doing. The questions I wasn't asking. The connections I wasn't making. The solutions I wasn’t offering because I didn’t know what problems we were actually trying to solve.

That changed when I started working for leaders who thought about information differently. The work coming to me stopped arriving as directives and started arriving as context: "Here's what the leadership team is focused on, here's where we want to go, here's what we're trying to avoid. Let me know if you see ways you and your team can contribute."

That single shift changed how I saw myself and what I was capable of doing.

Suddenly I wasn't just a tech writer. I was an information designer, thinking about audience segments, researching delivery tactics, gathering metrics on process alignments, analyzing impact. I wasn't solving company problems (yet), but I was contributing to solutions. And the company was getting more value from what they were paying me, while I was growing into something I hadn't anticipated: a leader who cared deeply about this exact thing.

When I built my own teams, I made a deliberate choice to lead the way I'd been best led. Not because it was the generous thing to do — though it is — but because I'd seen firsthand what it produces. People who understand the mission don't just execute it; they extend it. They catch things you missed. They find efficiencies you weren't looking for. They bring you problems before the problems become crises. The information flowing back to you improves because the information you gave them was good.

That's a feedback loop. And like any living system, it only works if both directions are open.

Transparency doesn't mean telling everyone everything. It's not turning on a firehose. It's ensuring your team has what it needs to execute today, and to think about how to execute better tomorrow. It's giving people not just water, but food and sunlight and room to move around — and then celebrating what they grow into.

The result, on my teams, was the lowest rate of regretted attrition I've ever seen across comparable teams. People stayed. People grew. People told me things I needed to know. None of that happens in the dark.

I learned this slowly, over years, from leaders who modeled it before I had language for it. To all of those leaders I’ve been fortunate to learn from in my career: thank you. You gave me more than context. You gave me a standard to hold myself to.