Leadership Nudge® 261 – Be Transparent admin June 12, 2019

Leadership Nudge® 261 – Be Transparent

It’s important to have a culture of transparency and vulnerability and leaders can model this behavior with their own personal characteristics with the help of the Johari Window. Watch as David explains.


When you want people to make assessments and tell you what they think they should do, it’s important to have a culture of transparency and vulnerability. So you need to model the behavior. You want to be transparent and vulnerable by your personal characteristics. And the tool we’re going to use for this is called the Johari Window. And it’s named after the team that came up with it.  

It’s a two by two matrix. Things are either known to myself or not known to myself, or they’re known to others or not known to others. 

So for example, things that are known to myself and others are out in the open. So for me, that might be something like, being direct. My team knows it. I know. No hidden secrets. Now, what about, I know it but my team doesn’t know. This is facade. This is things that I’m hiding from other people. And for me, let’s say that, secretly, I’m disorganized. But I have all these workarounds to try and give the illusion that I’m actually organized. 

Not known to self. I don’t know it, but the team does. These are blind spots. So for me, let’s say that, sometimes I show up as a know it all. I don’t think that. But my team, for some reason, does. 

And then there’s the unknown, both to myself and my team. So let’s say that its oversensitive. Things happen. I react in a certain way, sometimes, we don’t really know why. I don’t know why, the team doesn’t know why. But it big stems from this over sensitivity that I have.  

Now, the idea behind being transparent and vulnerable is to shrink the size of these windows by being transparent, not hiding stuff from your team, not hiding your fears, not hiding what you perceive to be weaknesses, and being vulnerable by asking them and inviting feedback.  

Hey, how did I show up in that meeting? How’s it working with me and inviting that feedback? So what you want to do is model the behavior of being a vulnerable and transparent leader. 

I’m David Marquet. That’s your Leadership Nudge®