02/22/2024

Transparency & Leadership in Today's Nonprofit Workplaces

Going it alone isn’t always the best tactic

The past few years may well be remembered as a time when transparency was a major source of concern for leaders and their stakeholders. Like you, I probably consumed too much information about what Elon Musk was and wasn’t being forthright about at X; meanwhile, the calls for leaders to be more open, either in the name of recruitment and retention or in the name of speaking out about social issues, have remained as intense as they were in 2020.

Small wonder, then, that CEOs increasingly feel that it’s their job to be the mouthpiece of the organization. A survey released last month by HarrisX and Ragan Communications found that 78 percent of CEOs say they alone “lead their organization's external communications”—a whopping 38 percent leap from 2021. (The figures are similar for internal communications.)

In some ways this is a good thing—a leader should play a key role in how the values and mission of an organization are shared. And with your staff, members, and stakeholders more comfortable than ever sharing their thoughts (or making demands), there’s more pressure than ever for clarity from leaders. As Melissa Swift, an executive at the workplace consultancy Capgemini Invent, recently wrote in MIT Sloan Management Review, “if people will see the reality of a given situation anyway, communicating about that reality from the jump means that individual leaders won’t have to scramble and backpedal when confronted by their teams.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.