How familiar are you with the expression “hidden agenda”? Have you ever felt that a leader, peer, client, partner, or supplier wasn’t telling the whole story about their intentions or actions?
Have you ever asked for information and were ignored or got vague answers? Have you ever requested a person or organisation to comply with a policy or to be accountable for something and felt you were manipulated to drop your request or feel guilty for it?
Those situations are the result of a lack of transparency. And as history shows, many controversial cases involving the sports industry happened because of that.
They could have been avoided if transparency had been part of the work culture. Even in less complex contexts, such as the interactions between teams to deliver tech at major sports events, being transparent can save us lots of time, energy, and stress.
Being transparent doesn’t mean having all possible information or sharing private data with everybody. As much as we aim at organisational efficiency, it is normal that we don’t have every piece of information classified and available or that you don’t have total clarity of our intentions and actions. Besides, some things require confidentiality.
Transparency is a policy. It is an attitude we apply to real-life situations. Therefore, if we realise we are not being clear with a partner, we take time to shed light on that. We train people to be more self-aware and communicate better. We make our spaces safer for people to give more precise and honest feedback.
If we see a gap in our data base, we restructure how we gather and share information. We get better management tools and apps. We make transparency part of our work culture.
At Legacy Sport, we work on those two levels. First, we train our communication abilities through regular team check-ins and individual conversations. Secondly, we use various management online tools that make the information as precise and straightforward as possible for any reader, whether a team member, a partner, a client, or an audit company.
As a result, we spend less time doing re-work, explaining issues already discussed, or meditating conflicts that emerge from miscommunication. We also have documentation that allows our partners, clients, suppliers, and us to create agreements, mitigate disputes, and hold accountable whoever is needed.
Transparency is a process that needs continuous improvement. Therefore, we will always find breaches that need to be addressed. But when we face them not as failures but welcome them as necessary inputs for our growth, having a transparent culture becomes exciting. It pushes us forward.
What place does transparency have in your work and your organisational culture? What symptoms do you see when transparency is not there? And how could you cultivate it more?
TEC – HEART – SPORT is our latest series of articles explaining the mission, vision, and culture that Legacy Sport shares with its community and the world. See below for a summary of each topic we will explore during the series.
Thrill
Expertise
Courage
Humanism
Empathy
Advocacy
Respect
Transparency
Sustainability
People
Olympism
Relationships
Transformation
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