Building Trust & Transparency
How Documentation is the Foundation for Trust. Write it Down!
One of the key themes I’ve posted about consistently over my career is that trust is the cornerstone of both team success and a thriving company culture. Trust is actively built through consistent behaviors over time. One critical behavior for trust to take root and flourish is for your leadership to be as transparent as possible as often as possible. Tell the truth for not just what’s working well but, more importantly, for failures and learnings.
“Write it down!” and “Document everything” were two key phrases I wrote about in my last post on Founders Mode quoted from famous leaders Brian Chesky and Ben Horowitz.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this simple documentation step skipped time and time again by high growth companies in favor of going faster. The act of simply “writing it down” once and consistently documenting and linking to decisions and decision making systems are a critical operational scaling practice that creates transparency.
When leaders fail to be transparent, they are also failing to create a culture of trust and a powerful collaboration culture where every team member can see not only what’s happening, but why and how it's happening.
Transparency is the foundation of:
Effective communication
Teamwork
Agile learning
Accountability
Significant time savings
Solves “where we work” in favor of “how we work”
And ultimately builds a culture of trust across the organization
Trust requires Transparency. Transparency requires “writing it down.”
If that’s the leadership strategy, let’s now properly structure it to help you execute transparency.
Here’s a step-by-step example. I’ve picked the Finance leadership team for this example:
Step-by-Step: Implementing Transparency Through Documentation
Step 1: Create a Dedicated Space for Documentation
If your company still relies on ad-hoc communication, it’s time to change that. You need a cloud based collaboration space for documentation to live and grow. Tools like Notion are ideal for this purpose, offering ready-made templates to help you get started. Google Drive can also work fine but make sure to actively use the comments feature to ensure others can weigh in. For the record, email or other chat based tools like Slack are NOT how your company should be “writing it down” or “documenting decisions.” Do not fall into the trap as a leader that you “sent an email” or “sent multiple emails on this subject” or “we had a huge thread on this on Slack.” The streaming nature of emails and slacks is NOT a “dedicated space” where people and teams can properly collaborate in a consistent way with quality inputs, outputs, and version control. Hybrid and remote work environments are even more critical to establish a proper cloud collaboration space to keep everyone aligned, and as Brian Chesky often says, “rowing in the same direction.”
Step 2: Document the Details: Start with the “Who, What, Why, and How”
For each role on the Finance team, start by documenting key details:
Who: Include a photo, job title, and a short bio of each team member (think LinkedIn snippet). Bonus: Encourage every team member to create a personal "ReadMe" document in the spirit of Claire Hughes Johnson's practice at Stripe.
What: Describe the role of each team member in clear terms and the key priorities being worked on currently for that role. Bonus: have every team member update their priorities here for everyone in the company to see and the expected impact of delivering the team’s priorities.
Why: Explain how this role fits into the broader team and how the Finance team intersects across priorities, impacts, and decisions across the organization. For example, when explaining the “Why” of Accounts Payable (A/P), you have an opportunity to underscore its importance in financial data accuracy, timeliness, and consistency and how the quality of A/P data input cascades all the way up from monthly financial reports, to annual planning, and all the way to Board room and investor presentations. Bonus: use this new team collaboration space to “ask the audience” to provide feedback on the priorities, execution, and impacts. A simple 5 star rating? Or other simply a feedback scoring system. This type of real-time company-wide feedback using your dedicated collaboration space is a powerful engagement tool when used creatively.
How: Outline how the role operates day-to-day. This will not only clarify responsibilities but also highlight interdependencies between finance and other departments. Describe the systems used and integrate the “How” of this system back to the “Why” of this system. The format of step by steps here in describing your systems or decision making processes really helps non-finance people to understand the “Why and How” of each step and overall system.
Need clarity on purchasing processes? Give your internal customers the cloud link to the relevant section.
Questions about who can decide or sign off on things (a.k.a signature authority)? Point your customers to the link in the doc.
Over time, this living document will grow to encompass everything from operational policies to financial best practices. You will end up writing significantly fewer emails and answering the same questions over and over again on Slack and the “space” you’ve now created will literally create “time” for everyone.
Step 3: Summarize the Purpose of the Finance Team
Now that you have the details of the who, what, why, how, it’s time to summarize the purpose of the Finance team in an executive summary type fashion. Feel free to create and highlight your team’s vision and mission at the top of this cloud based collaboration space. Link to this space a lot. When executed properly, the answers to most everything Finance lives and breathes in this “Finance Page” and it’s now way easier to tell your customers inside your company to “start here.”
So many people loved Claire’s ReadMe document but many failed to apply her same powerful individual document at a team level. Individuals should not only own their own ReadMe type doc but each department and each team should OWN their team document.
Imagine if you ran the whole company with documentation like this? It’s a behavior change for sure and it will require new habits for everyone to own their space. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Your new team space should be versioned a lot. It’s the very act of versioning (a.k.a learning) and using these spaces for company-wide feedback that quickly creates not only critical transparency but much stronger trust across the organization.
Encouraging Ownership Through Documentation
It’s important to repeat and emphasize how everyone should own this documentation/collaboration space. You may want to start with somebody on your team who has a superpower of creating such a collaboration space, but over the long term, this type of “documenting most everything” should not be owned by one person.
As your team’s leader, you will have to model this and hold others on your team accountable for not just “telling you” verbally or “having a meeting” but to make sure they document the key decisions and systems. You may want to literally ask them, “Have you created a page for this?” or “Do we need a page for this?” or simply, “Send me the link.” The overarching goal here is to build ownership and accountability from the ground up and to have each owner communicate efficiently with their respective customers inside the organization.
I’ve seen and led great finance teams that model this type of transparent documentation. I’ve then seen other teams start copying it. Don’t be surprised if you start hearing things like, “We should create a document like Finance’s.” And here’s a tip: once you’ve built out the Finance documentation, clone it and offer a blank template to other teams to kick-start their own documentation process.
Remember, Finance sits at the unique intersection of all company activities, so the better you document and share your processes, the more time you’ll save in the long run. As I like to say, “Space creates time.”
