How - Dov Seidman [82]
Transparency in its active form has a remarkable effect on people. It calls them out to meet you on the plane of openness, it speeds and encourages trust and collaboration, and—here’s the surprising part—it is incredibly disarming. I’m talking about something greater than just telling the truth. Rather, the new conditions of the world can become a competitive edge if you aggressively embrace transparency in its verb form, to be transparent. If business is no longer war, then you need to practice skills that take the war out of business. That’s what makes active transparency so effective. As we have seen, active vulnerability with others creates the conditions in which they can be vulnerable with you, and trust creates trust, on a biological and an organizational level, with mutually beneficial results. Vulnerability, in this way, is actually strength.
Last year, I had a “Sig moment.” I was having a business dinner with Alan Spoon, a managing general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in growth companies around the world, and former president of the Washington Post Company. He was interested in investing in LRN, and I was interested in him becoming part of the team. During the meal, Alan asked me frankly what my board thought of a certain aspect of my performance. Without hesitation (thank you, Sig!) I found myself saying, “I think they’d give me a pretty low grade; I don’t know—C-minus.”
He was clearly very surprised.
I didn’t tell him that because he would have found me out; I was up-front with him because I was trying to inspire him to join in with me, to see that I understood the work ahead and could be honest about what’s working and what’s not. I employed the power of transparency toward creating a more intimate collaboration, toward getting aligned faster. Any truth I shaded was going be something we’d have to talk about later, something that would undermine the trust in our future dealings, and something that would stifle any inspiration for him to be part of what I’m trying to do—ever. I could have let him take six months to drill down to the truth, but by just putting it out there I extended a powerful invitation. This worked to my advantage in the long term.
Some months later, Alan was at a meeting also attended by some members of my board. He called me soon after. He had indeed quizzed them about the very subject that I had opened up to him about, he told me, and was even more impressed with my transparency as a result. The board was less critical of me that I was. Now, you can imagine someone playing games with this. The Machiavellian schemer in us could say, “Set him up. Tell him something negative because you know he’ll get something rosy when he checks.” But trust me on this: You don’t want to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. It will inevitably backfire later. People sense when you are trying to game them or the system, and they react with suspicion. The power in this sort of candor lies precisely in its guilelessness. You can imagine how much more negatively someone will react if they’ve been lulled into a sense of security and trust by guile and subterfuge. From that place, there is no going back. “Fool me once, shame on you,” the old maxim goes. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” To tell a potential investor “You know, the board would give me a low grade on that” is a dark point to make. But when you’re aware of the power of honesty and transparency, you get inspired to be more honest.
I had an even more powerful reason to take off my Master of the Universe suit and open up to Alan. Vulnerability creates true opportunities for deep collaboration, a much more profitable relationship than just making money. Being transparent with him created a moment that made it clear that I thought Alan was more valuable than the money he could potentially invest. After all, in the same way I want my journey and the journey of LRN to be more significant