Transparency can contribute to heartless management
Everyone likes dashboards everywhere, but a bad manager (knowingly or accidentally can use that transparency to negative ends, going back to a fear-driven organization:
Many managers, leaders, and theorists have highlighted the importance of transparency, especially this century, but most have also conceded that opening up all the channels for all kinds of work-related and financial information is far easier said than done. It is also the reason why we prefer the concept of “openness” to highlight that what and how we communicate is not a passive process of making things visible, but an active sharing, revealing, listening, understanding, and responding process. Transparency can be a passive process that does not discriminate what is perceived unless deliberate filters are built in. We know that we rarely want to see everything. Openness is a choice of what is important to reveal to get the job done, not just the metrics of what happened and when. … n the long run, however, with such transparency as a means of control more than as a means of communication (openness), companies trend toward entropy as disillusioned talent leaves, the wrong kinds of skills and performance are promoted, and creative pivoting in response to market changes becomes politically controversia … We believe teams of all sizes perform better when team members feel psychologically safe to be open with each other. Whether we label it a climate of fear or the loss of psychological safety at BCS, it likely dampened the spirits, undermined openness, and threatened the company’s ability to innovate and pivot. Protecting psychological safety might have resulted in slowing time to market in the short term but might also have increased resiliency in the long term."