Balancing between, “how much should I tell my client” and “how much I shouldn’t” can be a fine line to walk on. I know I should tell him everything, but in real life, it’s often really hard. How do I tell him about my own mistakes, or about huge problems on the horizon he just doesn’t want to see, or about issues that I think are big but he just doesn’t realize their importance so he just writes me off every time I’ve tried to do so in the past? What do I do?
Here’s one possible solution. Try not just being transparent, but extremely, absurdly, over-the-top transparent and define yourself as such. On your first day on the job, announce, “I believe in the most extreme form of transparency.” One of the great things about making a public announcement is that it forces commitment. Once you tell everyone that that is how you define yourself… you need to live up to it. Or else you’re going to embarrass yourself.
What’s powerful is the general attitude, not just of transparency but of viewing each client engagement, or each job, as an opportunity to learn. You can be a bit of a different person in each one, see how each one goes, and then use it as learning to feed your mental algorithms on how to change your behavior going forward. A variation of this concept is to treat each client as an experiment, and with this one be a bit more like X, with that one be a bit more like Y, and see how it goes. This is the scientific method at its purest!
But back to transparency: since finding the right balance is hard, it’s worth it to experiment with taking an extreme position and see how it turns out. Some reasons why it may turn out to be good include:
- It builds an absurd amount of trust with the client or your boss.
- It makes it easier for you to decide what to tell vs. what to not tell (i.e., tell everything).
- It helps you bring problems to the surface quicker and solve them quicker.
- It helps reveal the incompetence of other team members quicker (making you look good).
- It forces you to address problems and issues that you might otherwise want to postpone or not deal with.
- It will make you kinder before criticizing others because he who lives in glass houses knows he can’t throw stones (unless he has to).
Absurd transparency, like you’re living in a glasshouse, to use the last metaphor. That may or may not work, but it is worth experimenting with. And if you do experiment with it, do remember even in a glasshouse, the bathroom isn’t in glass. That was a metaphor, in case that wasn’t obvious.
