There’s a version of transparency that a lot of leaders practice without realizing it’s not quite the real thing.
Consider two leaders getting the same directive from HR. One walks back to their team and says, “I wouldn’t do it this way, but HR told me I have to.” The other says, “I don’t have all the answers yet. Here’s what I do know, and here’s how we’re moving forward. I’m open to your input as we figure this out together.”
The first one might feel honest. But it’s an abdication. The leader is distancing themselves from the decision, managing their own discomfort at the expense of their team’s clarity. The second one requires something harder: being willing to say “I don’t know yet” out loud, in front of the people you lead.
That’s the genuinely courageous work.
I call the first pattern “performative transparency.” It usually comes from a genuinely good place. The values of openness are real. The desire not to keep secrets is sincere. And so it shows up as sharing anything and everything that comes to mind, regardless of how it might land, regardless of whether it actually helps the people around you do their best work.
That’s not transparency. It’s broadcasting. And over time, it erodes the very trust it was meant to build.
The difference is discernment
Real transparency isn’t about saying everything. It’s about pausing before you share anything, to ask yourself: what does my team actually need to know right now to be effective? And then: how do I deliver this in a way that demonstrates I’m leading, not just reacting?
The story underneath the story
Here’s what I’ve noticed: what most often gets in the way of real transparency isn’t dishonesty. It’s an inherited story. Most leaders are carrying a definition of leadership they picked up somewhere along the way. From a mentor. From a culture. From years of watching what got rewarded. Wrapped into that definition is a belief, often completely unexamined, that a leader is supposed to have answers. That uncertainty is weakness. That being transparent about not knowing something is the same as failing to lead.
That inherited story, layered on top of the shaping of our own inner critics, creates a leader who is genuinely trying to communicate well but communicating from a script written by someone else.
Real transparency requires giving that script a second look. Not to tear it apart, but to ask: is this actually serving the people in my care, or is it protecting me from the discomfort of not knowing?
What shifts when leaders let go
The leaders I’ve witnessed who do transparency well share a common belief underneath their communication. They hold, at the core of how they operate, that the needs of the people around them are at least as important as their own needs.
That belief changes everything about how they show up. It stops being about managing information and starts being about partnership. They’re not telling and then asking. They’re genuinely in the conversation with the people they lead.
And something shifts over time for teams who work with those leaders. The team stops spending energy decoding what the leader is really thinking. They stop reading between the lines, looking for what isn’t being said. They learn that what they see is what they get.
More than consistent communication, that is consistent presence. The two can look similar from the outside, but they feel completely different to the people on the receiving end.
Presence is what lays the groundwork for psychological safety. When people feel safe, they stop managing upward and start bringing their best. Trust becomes something real and durable, not because the leader said the right things, but because their inside and outside matched, again and again, over time.
A place to begin
Real transparency doesn’t require you to have everything figured out. It actually asks the opposite. It asks you to be honest about what you don’t know yet, and clear about what you do.
Before your next difficult conversation or team update, try sitting with this: am I sharing this to serve the people in the room, or am I sharing it to manage my own discomfort?
The answer will tell you more than the words you were planning to say.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to continue the conversation. You can reach me at Jenna@JennaStoliker.com, or if you’re ready to explore what conscious, trust-centered leadership looks like in your own context, I’d be honored to sit with you in a discovery conversation. You can schedule one [here].
