A business-school professor argues that being more open and transparent at work directly increases earnings. He frames honesty as a profit-making strategy backed by research, not just a feel-good principle.
How do you sell the benefit of being more open and what you call oversharing to somebody? Yes. Who is just in your class to get ahead? Yes. What is the real benefit of that?
Yes. The way I start is by speaking their language. So I teach a lot of executives and what I do is I start by showing them in business contexts how this, first of all, this is crass, maybe, I am a business school professor, how it helps them make money. Yep. And then I show—
Wait, so if you share more, you make more money?
So the example I give there, I know, what? As a company, so when we reveal, when we share more, when we open up, when we reveal slightly sensitive things, it causes whoever we're revealing to, to trust us more. And the same is true in companies. When companies reveal more, it causes their trust— and I don't use the word cause lightly, right? These are randomized experiments. It causes their customers to trust them more and to buy more. So we've done studies with like the largest bank in Australia, for example, where with my colleague Ryan Buell, where somehow we convinced them to on their credit card website. So when you're going and looking for a credit card, on their bank, what we convinced them to do is half of the time to reveal reasons why you might not want the credit card. So like, pay attention, the fees are really high, or the points aren't great, or whatever, the high interest rate, like drawing attention, basically saying don't buy this. But that's a form of sensitive disclosure, right? And what did that do? It actually, it did not scare people away. It didn't decrease customer acquisition and it increased retention. The experiment alone made the bank millions of dollars and then they rolled it out and then their competitors copied them. So that's where I start. And then I go into leadership and there I go into how when you're a leader revealing a little bit more than you think you should. And I take them through, I first get them to craft a little self-introduction. I say, "Imagine you're about to introduce yourself to a group of new hires." What would you say about yourself? And then I say, raise your hand if you had any negative traits in that. Crickets. And then I said, we did a study with actual managers where we randomized them to either do what you did and not share weaknesses, or some of them planted, put a few weaknesses in. And then we asked the employees who they want to work for. They want to work for the person that has the weaknesses. They don't think the employer is incompetent. They just trust them more and they want to work for them.
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