Skillsoft, OneAdvanced: HR Leaders Need Radical Transparency

What if you could cut workplace stress by 74% without touching your benefits package? 

The trick doesn’t include expensive perks, flashy office redesigns or a complete overhaul of compensation strategies. Instead, it’s much simpler: leaders need to be more transparent.

By leaning into trust, businesses can expect to see a 50% increase in productivity – a logical correlation, considering 86% of leaders agree that transparency is the primary driver of trust, according to Deloitte.

And the best part? Businesses will see the benefit almost immediately, with Harvard and Nectar research sharing that the impact of consistent communication is immediate and measurable. As a result, providing timely updates to employees will make them more likely to trust leadership (62%).

Introducing structured frameworks is a great place to start, and HR leaders can expect to see a 38% increase in trust, while those utilising dedicated communication tools reported a 47% trust surge in just six months. This is where radical transparency comes into play.

What is radical transparency?

For Leena Rinne, radical transparency “has become a defining quality of effective leadership.”

Expressing that leadership is “no longer about title or hierarchy,” Leena highlights the importance of how leaders communicate, listen and empower others every day. 

“Crucially, these behaviours are not innate traits; they are skills that must be intentionally built and reinforced as leadership becomes more complex,” she explains, while insisting that traditional, top-down models of “heroic leadership” no longer fit the complex environments organisations now navigate. 

“Influence stems less from authority and more from a leader’s ability to empower their teams, ask thoughtful questions, foster collaboration and create the conditions for shared problem-solving,” she adds. 

Consequently, leaders who embrace radical transparency underpin this shift by encouraging others to share not only decisions, but also the reasoning, assumptions and constraints behind them. 

Employees are, therefore, encouraged to understand the “why” behind decision-making, making them more likely to feel valued, engaged and motivated to contribute meaningfully. 

Listen and apply

As transparency is a two-way street, HR needs to ensure that it is listening to its workforce. 

For OneAdvanced Chief People Officer, Katie Obi, data is “essential as organisations scale”, yet she notes that capacity doesn't always allow businesses to talk individually to every person across the company. 

“Data informs us on what is working, what is not and how strongly correlated things may be,” she tells HR Chief Magazine. 

“Listening data, however, is only a signpost. The root cause of any issue is diagnosed through further fact gathering and conversations exploring the topic. This helps differentiate between an opinion and a systemic issue, and action taken on the right things builds trust that things will be acted upon.

Leena agrees with this sentiment, explaining that, to ensure leaders are genuinely listening to their employees, organisations must “move beyond intent” to “embed listening into everyday practice”.

To do so, she suggests encouraging open dialogue within teams and creating environments where employees feel comfortable speaking up. 

“Listening must be visible,” she notes. “Leaders need to demonstrate how employee input informs decisions and outcomes. Establishing clear feedback loops and holding leaders accountable for responding to what they hear helps ensure that listening is not performative but consistent.”

Katie adds: “The discipline HR leaders need to build isn't better surveys; it's building an organisation that understands how to diagnose root causes and how to have better conversations.”

Organisations that can identify the root causes of miscommunications are a massive step forward. However, even the most sophisticated diagnosis won't be accurate if the symptoms are being misreported. In reality, this “filtering” that happens between levels is often the biggest hurdle to genuine organisational change.

“In my experience, feedback gets watered down when the people passing it up aren't fully listening, don't understand what they're hearing, or fear it will reflect poorly on them,” Katie says. “None of those are fixed by better channels. They're fixed by changing who's doing the filtering and the culture around delivering uncomfortable truths.”

For Katie, the most reliable antidote is found in skip-level conversations. “When executives hear directly from two and three levels down, two things happen: the message arrives intact, and the managers in between quickly learn that watering things down isn't a safe strategy,” she explains.

The accountability trap

Creating a culture where each and every employee can be heard is no mean feat – and for some leaders, it may seem like a tick-box exercise. But to ensure the right policies and procedures are in place, HR teams should lean into measuring these metrics. 

This can be achieved through engagement scores, skip-level conversations and 360-degree feedback, for example. However, Katie insists that measurement is not the full answer. “If a manager genuinely cares about their team, they're already listening,” she says. “If they don't, accountability structures and governance lead to box-checking rather than a behavioural shift.”

As a result, she suggests that the real question isn’t ‘how can we hold managers accountable for listening’, but rather ‘do we have the right people in our management positions in the first place?’. 

“People management is a responsibility and a duty, not a side-of-the-job task,” Katie summarises. “Managerial roles should be reserved for people who actually want the responsibility of developing others, not used as a reward for technical performance, or a means to a title or pay increase.

“If companies get the selection of people managers right, the accountability question largely takes care of itself.”

Likewise, Leena affirms that this type of leadership does not happen by accident. Instead, it requires organisations to “invest in building the human skills that enable leaders to communicate openly, navigate uncertainty and engage others with confidence.” 

“When these skills are developed and made visible, radical transparency becomes not just an aspiration, but a consistent leadership practice,” she concludes.