Culture Over Coffee
Culture Over Coffee
The Transformative Power of Open Leadership with Matt Sunshine
In this episode, we're breaking down why transparency and authenticity are two qualities all leaders should actively demonstrate in their day-to-day duties.
And joining Beth to help explore the many facets of being a transparent leader is my favorite business leader, Matt Sunshine, CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy.
Matt offers a lot of food for thought about:
- How transparency not only fosters trust within an organization, but also allows everyone to feel that much more comfortable sharing their ideas.
- Why, if you're only sharing the good news, that's not transparency, that's just PR.
- And, finally, how your employees should know less information than what you would tell your closest confidant, but more than what you would tell the general public.
Links:
Grade Your Company Culture
Matt Sunshine
Beth Sunshine
Up Your Culture
Hello and welcome to Culture Over Coffee, a podcast focused on improving company culture and fostering employee engagement. Every week, we chat with experts and thought leaders about the latest information and proven practices you can use to reduce regrettable turnover, increase productivity on your team and retain key customers. So pour a cup of your favorite brew and join us. I'm your host, beth Sunshine SBP it up your culture in the Center for Sales Strategy.
Beth Sunshine:In this episode, we're breaking down why transparency and authenticity are two qualities all leaders should actively demonstrate in their day-to-day duties, and joining me today to help explore the many facets of being a transparent leader is my favorite business leader, matt Sunshine, ceo of the Center for Sales Strategy.
Beth Sunshine:Matt offers a lot of food for thought about how transparency not only fosters trust within an organization, but also allows everyone to feel that much more comfortable sharing their ideas. Why, if you're only sharing the good news, that's not transparency, that's just PR. And, finally, how your employees should know less information than what you would tell your closest confidant, but more than what you would tell the general public. All right, well, welcome Matt. Today we're going to be talking about why transparency and authenticity are key for leaders, and I'm really excited to get your take on this. I know you pretty well. I know that these are core principles in your own leadership style and qualities that many people in our company especially admire in you, so I'm really excited to take your take. Thank you for joining me today for Little Culture Over Coffee and for sharing your perspective on all of this.
Matt Sunshine:Are you ready to get started? One of my absolute favorite topics, so let's jump in.
Beth Sunshine:I believe that's true. Very good, all right, I'm excited to jump in, but before we do, before we get into that topic, I just want to do a quick brain gel with you. So, take a moment to envision the very best company culture you can think of and tell me three to five words you'd use to describe that. What is, to you, an ideal culture?
Matt Sunshine:I should have read the questions before we started. Three to five words that I would use to describe an amazing culture engaged. I'm going to not follow your directions, I'm not going to give you words. So engage would be one alignment. It has the same kind of North Star. So alignment, transparency, for sure, and caring. And when I say caring I mean caring for each other, caring for the customer, caring for the product or service that your company has. So I think that'd be it alignment, transparency and caring.
Beth Sunshine:I love that. I love that, and I suspect if you asked a bunch of people who worked at our company or clients you've worked with for a long time, I would imagine they would actually say that that very much describes our culture. So not only is it the ideal, but I think it's something you've really worked to create over the years. All right, so you set us up nicely, because one of your words was transparency, and that is what we're gonna talk about today. So let's jump into that topic and just tell me how would you define transparency and authenticity just in a leadership context, and why are they so crucial for effective leadership?
Matt Sunshine:So I think so how would I define it? I would define transparency as every person at the organization being up to speed on the relevant, important, pertinent information that the company is dealing with the good and the not so good. If all it is is good, then that's not really transparent. That's really just telling people what the good stuff is, pr, right, pr. So I think that's a off the cuff definition of transparency. What was your second part of your question?
Beth Sunshine:Yeah. Why do you think it's so important when it comes to effective leadership? Why does it matter so much?
Matt Sunshine:Yeah. So why I think it's really important and why it's important for effective leadership, I think are two different questions. Why I think it's important is because we spend a lot of time at work. I mean more than certainly more than 30%, 40%, in some cases, 50% of our week is spent at work or working at your company. If you don't know what's going on, then you're really not part of the company. You're really just a cog, right. You're just really a worker, and I think that you want people at least I want.
Matt Sunshine:I always wanted to know what was going on because I wanted to be a big part of the success of the business. So I always figure it's important that others know what's going on so they can be plus. If they know what's going on, they could share some ideas and they might have really really good ideas that you've never thought of. But if they don't know what's going on, you're gonna, as a leader, you're gonna get frustrated with their ideas because they don't have the big picture, they don't know everything going on. So I think it's really important to be transparent. I also think that by being transparent, it makes for a better organization, makes for stronger leadership. But whether or not you're a leader or not. You should be transparent.
Beth Sunshine:I would agree. And so, moving outside of just the leadership role and kind of thinking about how people interact with each other coworkers, maybe, how an employee interacts with their manager how do you think that transparency and authenticity foster trust in general among team members?
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, I think it fosters trust in a really, really significant way, and here's the reason why in business unfortunately, it's not always good news.
Matt Sunshine:It isn't there are a lot of tough decisions that need to be made along the way in running a business, whether that's people decisions or product decisions, or customer decisions, or timing decisions or all sorts of really, really tough decisions or maybe set a better way, all sorts of really important decisions. They become tough when you have to go it alone. They become really, really tough when you gotta go it alone, and I just feel strongly that the more transparency you have so that others can see what is going on, the better the results will be. That doesn't mean and I'm sure you're going to ask questions about this being transparent doesn't mean you have to share all your laundry, all your dirty laundry. I mean sometimes you can't right, sometimes you just can't, and sometimes it's not productive to do that. Transparency to me means that you're being really authentic in sharing the most relevant, pertinent information so that people know where we are at getting towards our shared North Star.
Beth Sunshine:Yeah, what you're describing is really going to lead to feelings of trust, feelings of almost security with the other people you work with. How do you think that kind of trust contributes to a company's overall success? If we're talking about things that are more measurable revenue, profits, things like that?
Matt Sunshine:Yeah. So I think, when there is trust right, and if transparency leads to trust, when there's trust, when somebody has an idea for a new way or a better way or an alternative way to do something, if there's a spirit of trust and a spirit of transparency, and if everyone's feeling as though they have a stake in what's going on and they're feeling that way because they've been entrusted with important information and valuable information they're going to speak up and they're going to say, hey, I got an idea, what about this? And everyone knows that not every idea that you have is good. I mean, heck, I have lots of ideas that aren't very good, right, but if you have that confidence and you have that trust that you can speak openly and go, hey, have we ever tried something like this or could we do this?
Beth Sunshine:or it could be the winner.
Matt Sunshine:It could be something where a bunch of people go oh yeah, that's a great idea. That would have never happened had you not been entrusted with information, and that being entrusted with that information is transparency.
Beth Sunshine:Yeah, really well said. I absolutely agree. Can you I mean you have a wealth of experience as an individual contributor, as a manager, as a consultant, as a company owner Can you share an example from any of those experiences where practicing transparency and authenticity has had a positive impact on a team or on an organization?
Matt Sunshine:Yeah.
Matt Sunshine:I can give you a few examples from different perspectives that I think will be relevant. So I worked for a company one time. That was all we heard for a while was how we forecast accuracy that's the best way to say it forecast accuracy. All we heard from leadership was how important it was for us to have forecast accuracy and when we didn't, we felt like we had let everyone down. And when we exceeded we actually felt like we let everyone down because we exceeded it, unless we hit the number exactly where we said we were going to hit the number. We felt as though we were not doing right, but none of us really understood why.
Matt Sunshine:The CFO of the company came to town one day and he had all the managers in the room and he brought it up. He said I know you've probably heard us beat the drum on forecast accuracy for a while. He said I don't think anyone's ever stopped down to tell you why that's so important. And he kind of unpacked the whole thing. He talked to us about the structure of the business and why that forecast accuracy was so important. He shared with us that we were actually trying to acquire some companies and that the better, the more we knew about where we were going to be the better decisions. He talked to us about how understating, sandbagging where you're going to be, is just as bad as overstating or overstating. So it was really that was one of the very first times that I felt like, wow, I'm kind of in the know, I know everything, and that was 20 years ago that that happened.
Matt Sunshine:But I'll give you another example. I worked many, many, many years ago. I worked for a company where there was no transparency. Nobody knew what was going on and because of that, whenever you had an idea, you kind of kept it to yourself. So the salespeople would all talk amongst themselves. You know what they ought to do around here. They would be smart if they just did this. No one ever shared it. No one ever shared that information with anyone, because they didn't care. They didn't tell us anything. We're going to tell them anything. So those are a couple of examples of what I witnessed as when I worked for other companies, of transparency.
Matt Sunshine:I'll tell you, at our company, I think that I work really hard at making sure that we have a really, really transparent, and I tell people all the time.
Matt Sunshine:If there's something I didn't share with you, it's just because I forgot to share it with you. And if you want to know what's going on, all you got to do is ask, and I'll be happy to go into as much detail as I possibly can so that you feel as though you understand how we're running the business. And I think because of that and some of the very, very best ideas that we've had actually came because we were open and transparent. A lot of people know that we just launched this sales accelerator AI at the Center for Sales Strategy and it's game changing and clients are absolutely loving it. But that's because we were extremely transparent with our company, that we wanted to explore ways to use AI, that we didn't know exactly what the right thing for us to do was. We trusted a group of people, we created a task force and we gave them all the information that we had. We were completely transparent and we let them come back with ideas and because of that transparency, I think we're a better organization. Because of it.
Beth Sunshine:I agree. I agree with you, and I think an organization has to really have a feeling of what we call psychological safety. For this to really work, you have to have a place where anyone you tap to beyond something like what you were just describing that task force knows that they can go off into the unknown. They can brainstorm, they can come up with wacky ideas good ideas, some wacky bad ideas. They can come back with all of their thinking and there will be no punishment, no humiliation, like everything is really going to be valued. We'll just help them decide which ideas are the better ideas. So you sort of open the door to that. So it's a vicious cycle. I think when leaders are transparent, their employees feel more secure. They're willing to be more transparent back in return, and I do agree that our company has that in spades. I love that.
Matt Sunshine:I've been extremely fortunate to have worked for a lot of really really great people over my career that were extremely transparent, not only with the company that they ran, but also with me personally with me and it's made a huge impact. I mean, whether that's people like Greg Lindahl or Dan Halliburton or Patrick Sabara or Steve Marks and Jim Hopes and John Henley, and there's lots of people that I've had the opportunity to work with that, even when I, as I was coming up, they were always very transparent with me. They always shared the business that was going on made me feel great about the places I worked.
Beth Sunshine:Yeah, I'm glad you got those names out there some really special people on that list. So we've talked about how much we value transparency, how we Use specifically has worked so hard to learn from the best to create that environment yourself. But, like you alluded to a little bit ago and you're right, we are going to talk about it transparency can sometimes be challenging. Particularly when we're talking about sensitive information, difficult situations, uncomfortable change. Transparency can can be tough. So how do you strike a balance between Transparency, which you value, but also Confidentiality that sometimes is required as a leader?
Matt Sunshine:Yeah. So you cannot break confidentiality. You can't, no matter how much you might want to. If it's something is told to you in confidence, it's told to you in confidence Period, that's it. So some tactics to to doing this.
Matt Sunshine:So if you always, if you, if you, if you get into a rhythm of the way you deliver information, then you can deliver it, whether it is the positive or the negative. If people know that you're always going to deliver this piece of information, then when that information is good, we high-five. And when that information is not good, we figure out a plan, right, and we're in it together and it's not personal, right, and the you know the, the best example. That is like quarterly numbers or something like that, but you only get, you're only gonna talk about sales when they're up. I mean, you know, yeah, when they're up, we're gonna talk about it. When, if they're good, we're gonna high-five. And if they're not up, we're gonna talk about it and we're gonna brainstorm how they can be better. So I think, as long as I think, one tactic, one is just having that rhythm or that cadence and that same style of Telling every single time and then just inserting whether or not it's really good or not so good.
Matt Sunshine:When it comes to confidentiality, I just want to go back to that a second. There are certainly times where you have information or you know things about what's going on that you can't share. And, yeah, you want to be transparent. But but to me, confidentiality is it? It's a, it's something you can't cross, because the moment you cross it, then everyone else at some point is gonna wonder well, I wonder if I share something in confidence, right, I don't think you can cross that line right, I agree, you know.
Beth Sunshine:There's a quote that I have absolutely top of mind because very recently I had a conversation on the culture of a coffee podcast with Lisa Cogan Presca. We were talking and it made our conversation made me pull this up on my phone, but it's something that I think really speaks to what you're saying. Simon Sinek once said transparency doesn't mean sharing every detail. It means providing the context for the decisions we make, and I just love the way Sometimes we can't share every detail, but people need to understand why the larger picture, for why our company is heading in that direction or why this is happening, and that that context gives people. Yeah. So what strategies or practices do you employ to ensure open and honest communication? So how do you encourage employees to share their ideas, concerns and feedback with other people, with you? You talked about tapping people for a task force. That's a more formal way of doing that, but any other strategies or practices you lean on often?
Matt Sunshine:ask people what they think. Simple as that and be sincere, like, don't ask them what do you think? Because you need to check a box, that said. I heard on this podcast this guy, matt Sunshine, said ask people what you know, like since I mean, if you sincerely care, you know. Of course you're gonna say, hey, here's the situation we're going to. What do you think about that? What should we do? Got any ideas for this? I mean, be open, transparent, honest. Come on, let's talk.
Beth Sunshine:Okay, question for you on that what happens when you ask for someone's opinion or idea? They give it to you and then you don't go in that direction. Handle that or what they didn't know. Matt, no people can give you really good ideas. That just yeah.
Matt Sunshine:You know that's a great question and I think that, if all, if you don't ask all the time and you just ask every once in a while, you definitely run the risk of being well, you asked me for an idea, I gave it to you. You didn't do anything about it, right? That's why you need to ask all the time, right? If you're asking all the time, right, and then you're following up and letting them know, or letting everyone know hey, we want this idea. By the way, we had lots of really great ideas. You can only pick one of them. We use this criteria to select this direction that we were going. If this doesn't work out, we got a hand, we got a bucket full of other ideas that you got. I mean, again, it just comes back to transparency, but I'm hearing from you and follow transparency and making sure people see all the way back around.
Beth Sunshine:What did we end up doing and why? Very cool, All right. One more question If you could recommend just one piece of advice and I know that's hard, this is actually very challenging for most people because you could come up with 10 pages of advice but if you could recommend just one piece of advice for other company leaders who are looking to increase their own level of transparency, become more authentic in their jobs, what would that one piece of advice be?
Matt Sunshine:One piece of advice for leaders of organizations to become more transparent.
Beth Sunshine:More authentic, something technical, strategic, something they could start. They can hang not hang out, but tune out of this podcast and go do maybe.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah. So I think a great way to start is by having a regular town hall meeting or a regular what some people call all hands meeting or quarterly company meeting call it whatever you want, but it's that meeting that happens regularly Once a month, once a quarter when, as a leader, you can provide a really good update on the business. More than the there's probably information that you would share with anybody. Right, there's information, as a leader, that you would share with your clients. You would share with your prospects. If you were giving a presentation to a public audience, you would share that information. Then there's probably 5% information that you would never share with anyone, except maybe your closest confidant Right, your closest. Maybe even just yourself. You share it with yourself Somewhere in between what you would share with your closest confidant and what you would share with the masses is what you should be really transparent with your organization.
Matt Sunshine:Right, they should get more than what you would tell the general public you should have. You should feel compelled to say I'm being really transparent with everyone. Let's keep what we're talking about To all of us and then give that information and you got to be okay with it and people I tell people this all the time they say to me well, matt, what if that person goes and tell someone that information? I got to trust them. If I don't trust them, we got another, we got other problems.
Beth Sunshine:Much bigger problem.
Matt Sunshine:What you see is I'm not going to not tell people that I don't trust them. I'm going to get people like trust and then be transparent with them.
Beth Sunshine:Okay, love that. It's a great piece of advice. So you're saying monthly, quarterly, some sort of regular cadence, some sort of an all hands or town hall meeting? I've heard it called an ask me anything meeting. Sure, they're sharing information, I imagine also leaving room for some sort of Q&A, so that there's that two way conversation. That's exactly what we do in our company that you've established, so I assume that would be part of it too. Yeah, awesome.
Beth Sunshine:Well, thank you, matt, for the time you spent talking about culture over coffee today with me. You shared a ton of good information and ideas, as I knew you would, related to driving engagement, focusing on transparency, really creating a more authentic leadership style. I know our listeners have found this valuable. Now, for everyone listening, I'm going to drop Matt's LinkedIn information in the show notes. You can connect with them. I recommend that you do.
Beth Sunshine:I'm also going to add a link that you can use to grade your company culture. So we have an interactive quiz. It only takes a few minutes, but it'll give you a really good sense of the current health of your culture, as well as some recommendations that can help, and there's an entire section of this interactive quiz on the topics we talked about today. So thank you, matt, for joining me and thank you everyone for listening. Thanks so much for spending time with us on culture over coffee. If you've enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe and join us for every episode For more helpful information on the topics of company culture and employee engagement visit us at upyourculturecom.
Beth Sunshine:Enjoy the journey as you increase engagement and up your culture.
