Apparently, he’s not the only UK-based entrepreneur with a fast-growing company and a remote team across the pond. Ryan Carson, the founder of coding tutorial site Treehouse, recently took to his blog to explain how he manages his widely dispersed team of 40, including a main office in Orlando and remote workers across America, from his home in Britain.

And this dispersed structure seems to be working for him. “I’ve managed the company for almost two years from another country with up to an eight hour time difference. We’re doing $3,000,000+ in revenue with over 11,000 paying customers and growing fast, so we must be doing something right,” he writes, before offering the following tips on how he makes it work:

Outsource HR. We use TriNet to do all of our HR (payroll, insurance, employment taxes and pension contributions). If I had to administer this, there’s no way I could’ve scaled the Team remotely this quickly or effectively.

Don’t do your HR in-house. There are a ton of legal requirements and logistical details to make sure you take care of your Team properly and it’s a huge time suck. TriNet costs roughly $100 per person, per month and it’s worth every penny. The UX on their web portal is terrible, but it’s very powerful and has all the functionality you need.

Hire a Financial Controller / Office Manager. We hired Rich Pettit as our Financial Controller and Office Manager. I sit 4,247 miles from our office in Orlando, and there’s no way I could run the company without a reliable and hardworking Team Member looking after the day-to-day operations.

A lot of you will think you can’t afford this person early on, and you’d be right. Don’t hire this person until you are comfortable from a cash-flow perspective. But as soon as you can, hire this person. I think Mark Suster is really smart (which is why I invited him to invest in Treehouse and thankfully he did) and he agrees.

Use Campfire for company chat. When you’re separated physically you need a place to hang out and talk about random stuff or ideas. We use Campfire and it works great. We have a bunch of different rooms setup like: Chiggity Chillin (company wide hangout), Product Team, Dev Team, Firehose (commits to the Treehouse GitHub repo and deploys to Production).

Organize visually. We’re now using Trello for all our company projects. We switched from Asana because Trello is more visual and it’s a little easier to see how things are progressing. They’re both great tools – we just found the left-to-right kanban-style layout of Trello very easy to parse quickly. Each card is an atomic to-do and you can see it moving through various stages to completion. Above is a screenshot of our actual “Product Team: In Progress” Trello board.

For more tips and Carson’s generally interesting thoughts on start-up life, check out his blog.

Do all of Carson’s tips make sense to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Haugen. 

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Since its launch last September women’s career advice site The Daily Muse has been run  by a largely remote team. However, the company recently opted for a change, moving together into San Francisco coworking space StartupHQ. Rather than growing out of coworking, this is one startups that’s growing into one, and in a recent post for Forbes, the Daily Muse teams explain why, for them, coworking beats a remote arrangement. Besides a swankier kitchen and more opportunities for bonding, they explain that their new home base provides significant advantages:

You Cut Down on Email (a Lot). I love email as much as the next woman does, but sometimes it can get a little out of hand. I never realized how much email traffic was being generated just keeping people in the loop, until I could look up and share a thought or idea with the team instead of busting out my laptop. It’s also been easier to keep the whole team involved in projects (or at least aware of them) when we’re all in the same space.

Instant Sales Leads. We work in a space with dozens of other companies. By meeting them and learning about their products, we’ve started to do business with many of them. In some cases, we’ve become their clients (we now use Xero, a cloud accounting solution), and in others, our deskmates have wanted to work with us. If you offer services to other companies, co-working can be a great source of sales leads, and you really can’t beat in-person customer service over coffee.

New Ideas. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to brainstorm. But that’s a lot harder to do alone. Being around my team means that we can riff of each other’s ideas and generate new, and often better, ones. Co-working has allowed us to have more serendipitous moments, and to better integrate sales, marketing, and editorial initiatives.

The debate around whether remote set-ups and coworking spaces work well for startups at different stages in their growth will likely rage on (here’s more from the pro remote camp, and here’s more from the anti if you want to catch up), as it seems that different companies have strong and opposed positions on the matter.

Do you think the ideal set up for a startup is simply down to the preferences and locations of the team, or can you say categorically that remote, co-located or coworking is best? 

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Personal recommendations are great and, as with any job, past performance is a nice indication of a potential employees’ abilities, but the interview, as ever, is key. You’ll need to ask the usual questions to get at the candidate’s suitability for the work but you’ll also need to probe how the candidate will handle the remote team set-up. Handily, there are questions that can help.

The easiest way to gauge if a potential employee will thrive on a distributed team is to find out if they’ve worked this way before and how they handled being remote. Wayne Turmel, who writes the Connected Manager column for Management Issues suggests wording your question on this topic, this way:

What has been your experience working as part of a remote team? Shut up at that point and let them answer. Keep the question open. They may tell you about technology challenges, they may tell you about working relationships, let them start where they are most comfortable then you can drill down.

Finding out a little bit about their work setup (Do they work at a coworking space? A home office? What’s it like?) is also valuable. “Describe your remote office and virtual workday?” CIO Insight suggests asking in a recent slideshow on interviewing for remote posts. But even more important, according to Turmel, is understanding their approach to technology and communication. He advises asking:

What technology have you used in the past as part of working remotely? This is a good question for several reasons. You’ll get a sense of their comfort level (listen carefully to tone of voice. Does their tongue drip with venom when discussion firewalls and connection speeds?)

You may also learn about other tools they’ve used that can be of value to your existing team. New hires are often thought of as blank slates, but people bring valuable experience to your group.

Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO and Founder of FlexJobs concurs, suggesting in an article covering the whole process of remote hiring, that interviewers ask: “What methods of communication do you prefer?” She also recommends asking candidates how they prioritize tasks and stay focused. CIO Insights also suggests asking directly about a potential hire’s ability to prioritize but also offers more specific questions to get at this sort of information, including:

• What did you do when a manager was absent and you had to make a decision? To get at an employee’s ability to be independent in a virtual work environment.
• How do you manage working for more than one supervisor? To get at their ability to juggle assignments for multiple parties.
• How do you stay current? To get a sense of whether they’re proactive and keep up to date with your industry.

What other questions have you found to be effective when interviewing for a virtual team?

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Several years ago, when Brian Curin and his business partners were busy building up the Cold Stone Creamery franchise, “We built a big office, the Taj Mahal of offices,” he explains. But this group of surfers and outdoor enthusiasts wasn’t particularly taken with the suit and tie lifestyle, so when they moved on to their next venture, they let their lifestyle considerations guide them.

The result is Flip Flop Shops, a quick-growing franchise of more than 45 stores selling beach-ready footwear, that Curin, who serves as president, and four partners run out of home offices spread from Atlanta to Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s a true lifestyle brand,” says Curin. “Jeans, T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops: that’s what we wear everywhere and what’s nice is it’s sort of expected. So where most people couldn’t get away with dressing like bums, when we go to places everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s the Flip Flop guys. It’s OK. Let them in.’”

Talent

Curin has a simple mantra when it comes to hiring: Attitude first. When adding to their team of support staff (currently five people) or deciding who gets a franchise, experience and qualifications come behind passion. “It’s so critical for us to get the absolute right fit, and that may not be the most qualified all the time. It may just be the person who goes, ‘I used to work in the corporate world and I’d cut off my left arm if I didn’t have to deal with that,’” he says, adding “when you find those people, you just have to set the expectations.”

And a particular location isn’t among his. “Go to Mexico!” he tells his staff. “You’d probably do better if you were just living the life and doing what we need you to do.” Nor are set hours important. “If the waves are good, they’re probably going to be out of their office,” Curin concedes. What is important is that people get work done on time and forge a personal relationship with the team.

To find the right talent for this type of team, Curin is a firm believer in interviewing face to face. “People can sound one way on the phone and interview great and look good on paper, but nothing compares to face to face,” he says, but he’s also a huge fan of a healthy degree of social media snooping to screen candidates before that stage.

“People aren’t smart on Facebook. Most people put everything out there, and so in a matter of a few minutes you get a really good flavor for their vibe. You either like it or you don’t, but it makes you way more prepared when you go meet with them,” he explains. Referrals also help ensure cultural fit: “It’s rare that we get somebody that’s just cold, never met them, out of the blue.”

Tools

In collaboration tools, as in footwear, Curin doesn’t get too fancy. “Part of the whole ‘free your toes’ mentality, this lifestyle we lead, is simplicity, so Apple,” he says, giving a one word answer to the tools his team uses to keep in touch. “Apple gives us all the gadgety things we need — iPhone, iPad, iEverything — to make this whole virtual office thing work for us,” he continues, sounding like a contented fanboy. Anything else? Just FaceTime (Apple again) and “no less than 20″ calls a day to CEO Darin Kraetsch.

The company is also a fan of social media, as we’ve heard for recruiting, but also for keeping up to date with franchisees. “We set up a closed loop Facebook page for shop owners only. We’re the admins on it so we can accept or deny people. The public can’t view it, and it’s set up as a platform for all of our shop owners to talk and share best practices, complain, share inventory, whatever it is,” he says.

Tips

“We respect the fact that we’ve got a really good thing here. We don’t suit-and-tie it. We don’t report to anybody,” says Curin, but he does see one downside to his current setup, and it’s a common one for virtual workers. “The one downfall is you truly never get that total shut off downtime except maybe once, twice a year where we tell each other, ‘hey, I’m going to Hawaii,’ my phone’s done,’” he says.

And while Curin admits that shutting out work stuff at home is a challenge, he’s firmer about shutting out home stuff when he’s working. “Make sure your space is set up the right way, so basically, when you go in there, it’s: ‘I am at work.’ You’ve got to make sure those ground rules are set with your significant other or your roommate, whoever it is.” And this space shouldn’t just be any old desk, chair, computer setup but a place that truly reflects your lifestyle. “To do it successfully, you can still be in your pajamas, but make sure your space fits the vibe of whatever business that you’re in.” Need an example? Check out Curin’s home office to the left.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be.

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I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

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In a recent article, Rothbard frets that because of specialized neurons, called mirror neurons, your team may suffer from their lack of physical proximity. She discusses some famous Italian neuroscience research on these neurons, saying of the researchers:

They found that what we do when we are watching [others] is that our neurons start mimicking, firing in the same way other people’s [neurons] are firing. They think this is the basis for social learning. We learn how to do things by watching other people…. It creates a pathway neurologically for us to follow.

Remote working, the article suggests, “could mean that skills don’t get transferred as quickly or completely from one employee to another because colleagues are unable to watch each other work.” So should you start fretting immediately about your team’s mirror neurons and whether they’re firing away in your Friday catch-up?

For those fascinated by the human brain (and who isn’t?), mirror neurons are an extremely hot topic. Here’s a 7-minute TED talk from neuroscientist VS Rachmachandran, which explains why some experts believe they’re at the very core of human civilization.

But perhaps it’s too early to be adding to your stress levels over the frontiers of brain science. First off, research mentioned in the New York Times suggests that children’s mirror neurons fire when watching violent TV shows and other studies have even shown that mirror neurons fire when we’re read descriptions of physical actions. So there’s no reason to despair yet that your training video conference is a failure at some fundamental biological level just because it’s not face-to-face (though if you’re using avatars in a virtual world, the jury is out).

Conclusion: keep an eye on mirror neuron research out of curiosity, sure, but it’s a little early to add it to the list of practical problems for web workers.

Do you find it harder to empathize with colleagues or learn new skills if you’re not face-to-face?

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Despite the proliferation of options for communication, the way workflow, responsibilities, and collaboration are managed in this scenario can be quite different from on-site or partially dispersed teams.

To get it right, team leaders need to consider the interplay of three crucial factors: frequency, transparency, and variability.

Frequency

In an office, communications are incidental, and frequency is high. With dispersed teams, communicating is an effort, and frequency is often much lower.

The concept of frequency affects communication like status updates and meetings, as well as casual team interactions. But it also affects momentum: the timeframes in which outputs are created, and how swiftly they’re taken into the next stage of the project.

Different projects and timeframes require different communications frequencies. You’ll want all the members of your dispersed team to be able to work comfortably to a given level of frequency, or intensity.

So as you’re planning workflow, milestones, and deliverables, consider whether your dispersed team will be working exclusively on this project, or on others at the same time. What does team members’ degree of focus mean for the potential frequency of communications and deliverables? How can you support those needs in order to get the job done?

Transparency

The best dispersed teamwork is supported by strong transparency. Your team members may never meet in person, but they need to get enough of a feel for one another to collaborate closely, and get the work done.

Transparency is important in a number of areas, including availability, progress and outputs, as well as personalities. Setting explicit baseline expectations of transparency — outlining up-front what kinds of project information should be shared, and how, for example — is a good start, but more work may be needed to keep things transparent on a day-to-day basis.

Should all project-related discussions be shared, and is IM therefore a less-than-deal communication tool? Are there times when team members will all be online — and does everyone know what those times are? Are there certain outputs that should not be available to all team members? Will your Yammer steam be strictly business, or will you encourage team members to share more broadly, to make it more fun?

These are the kinds of questions that are easily overlooked, but which can greatly influence the sense of openness and participation of distributed team members.

Variability

It can be easy to see remote team members as resources, or sets of capabilities, rather than real people with real lives. A truly productive, smooth-working dispersed team will flexibly cater to individuals’ needs and differences.

This might mean that you create a rotating schedule for team meetings, so that everyone shares the burden of time zone differences, and the same team member isn’t staying up until midnight every Tuesday to meet with you.

You may encourage team members to share things like personal websites or work histories, so each team member has an idea of others’ experience, capabilities, and areas of interest. You might ask the team to choose the tools you use to share information and communicate about the project.

Promoting the open communication of unexpected hurdles — illnesses and other events that take team members out of the work for a period — may be another way to ensure the smooth running of a team whose members may come online at different times, and at different intervals from the team leader.

Frequency, transparency and variability are critical factors in the smooth running of dispersed teams. Being conscious of them as you establish and support remote team members can have a significant impact on project success.

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It makes sense to focus on project briefs and core competencies — after all, these are what gets the job done. But what gets the job done well? Often, it’s team members’ non-core skills and experience — and their freedom to apply those capabilities to the project — that make the collaboration a real success.

This is especially the case in experimental work, where the path to the desired outcome may be unclear, and work in distributed or completely new teams. If it’s not clear how your team members should make contributions to others’ domains, or whether they’ll be valued, you’ll never get the most out of the project.

What can go wrong

Recently, I worked with a new, distributed team on a fairly experimental project. Team roles, relationships and work patterns hadn’t been clearly defined. While I knew some team members, others were new to me, and I’d never worked closely with any of them before.

As the work began, team members struggled to identify where their contributions should begin and end. We all knew what each others’ core competencies were — it was the extra stuff that got confusing.

There was overlap between team members’ areas of expertise, but the team structure and approach to collaboration — which, while supported by the appropriate tools, was loose and fairly unpredictable — caused blockages. Some team members didn’t want to step on any toes; others wondered why no one was taking responsibility for certain contributions. Few of the team knew what they could expect from their colleagues.

This project didn’t fail, but it took longer than expected, and project overhead expanded, since communication wasn’t smooth-flowing. The usual pitch-in mentality became mired in a subtle kind of confusion. Assumption took the place of inquiry and clarification, so opportunities to capitalize on each team members’ capabilities slipped past.

Welcome more than core skills

Leaders organize people into teams on the basis of their core skills, which is fine. But to really make the most of everything each team member has to offer, you’ll need to go further than simply providing a project brief and setting up a file repository.

• Evidence of a collaborative culture. Culture is particularly important for new teams, or teams that comprise people from several departments, offices or organizations. Give some thought to how you’ll evince that culture — from the way meetings are run, to the way ideas are presented, captured, discussed and actioned. What evidence says to team members that all contributions — not just core-skill offerings — will be welcomed and valued? Does your evidence translate for team members operating from other locations? Keeping that evidence consistent is also critical. It’s all very well to be open, welcoming and responsive in a meeting, but if you neglect to respond to team members’ post-meeting emails or messages for days, you’ll likely erase any goodwill you generated, and engender a culture of flakiness and irresponsibility instead.
• A clear collaboration model. Does all team work involve all team members, or are some working in smaller groups, without the leader’s input? Flat structures and easygoing reporting requirements may seem to encourage the free flow of ideas, but the reality is that groups comprised of team members who haven’t worked together before may need more guidance, encouragement and transparency, especially at first, or if the team is distributed. Leave them to their own devices and silence may well ensue. Discuss up-front the basic expectations you and your team members have for the collaboration, and how extra ideas will be treated and addressed. As you adjust the model to fit the needs and suggestions of your team, make sure everyone’s aware of the model’s evolution. Over time, the team will likely develop its own culture, and you may well be able to take more of a backseat, but be wary of doing this in the initial stages.
• Meet expectations. Once you’ve all agreed on how things will happen, fulfill those expectations for your team, and ensure that your team members do the same. If your team management, or team members, are unpredictable in the way they respond to each other and events, the result is uncertainty. That may translate to team members feeling that the project isn’t important to their colleagues, and deciding to do only what’s required — not to bother making value-add suggestions beyond their core competency. It may reduce team members’ confidence to put themselves — and their “crazy” ideas — out there. Or it may just mean that team members spend more time trying to work out what’s going on than focusing on collaboratively creating the best possible solutions. In any case, unpredictability reduces team members’ ability to focus on the work itself.

A really successful team project is, of course, fulfilling and rewarding for team members. The evolving nature of the digital space may have reduced the likelihood that individuals will be typecast into narrow roles, yet leaders may still struggle to elicit the full breadth and benefits of colleagues’ past experiences if they don’t consciously work at it.

Have you worked with teams that really valued and benefited from the contribution of non-core skills? What aspects of the team management made the project work well?

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What exactly is curation?

In a nutshell, curation is selecting content from the web, based on specific criteria and presenting it to an internal or external audience, or both. With aggregation, the precursor to curation, we generally selected content for our personal consumption and had little filtering control. We usually had to be satisfied with receiving all content from a given source (the entire RSS feed of a site, for instance) without being able to filter out content we didn’t want. With curation, you choose specific items to share from a source and have the option to add your own editorial comments. If you’ve ever tweeted a link or retweeted someone else’s tweet, you’ve curated content.

Did you see that thing I tweeted?

It can be frustrating to try to get information you want to share to everybody on your team who could benefit from it. You all need to be up to speed on your market, competition, technology, trends, etc. If you’re sharing this info in a haphazard way (using multiple communication channels, crossing your fingers that team members will see and act on the info, mixing items of personal and professional interest), then having a system for content curation might be for you.

Where to start?

Curation platforms are still in their infancy; no single tool is likely to be the perfect solution for your needs. You’ll have to explore the various platforms and keep an eye on the evolution of the trend if it interests you. Be on the lookout for curation features to start being integrated into collaborative project management platforms. In fact, Producteev, a task management app that we’ve covered before, will soon allow team members to curate content and attach it to specific projects and tasks.

Fortunately for you, Pierre Tran, a French tech journalist, recently carried out an extensive comparison of a number of curation platforms, and prepared a very useful table in English and French that you can use to start exploring.

The platforms in Tran’s table offer a range of output options (the format in which people will be able to consume your curated content) from RSS feeds to embeddable widgets to stand-alone web pages. Their intended use ranges from collection of business intelligence (BI) for a company’s or team’s internal use (Eqentia, Knowledge Plaza, Factiva) to collecting and sharing interesting images or multimedia (Fancy, Pinterest, Magnify). Depending on what it is you do, the BI platforms might meet the needs of your team but, then again, if your team is composed of graphic artists, the “pretty picture” type of platform might come in handy as a group inspiration board.

You also need to decide if you want to curate exclusively for your team, or if you also want clients or the public to have access to the results of your curation efforts. Most curation platforms are designed for sharing the content with a public audience (Pearltrees, PublishThis), which your team could also access, of course.

Scoop.it

The only curation platform I’ve spent any time with is Scoop.it. It allows you to create a standalone page that resembles a blog and features content you have selected from the sources Scoop.it has helped you gather. There’s also a bookmarklet you can use to scoop up content you see when you’re out and about on the web.

Your team (and your clients, and the public) can subscribe to the RSS feed of your Scoop.it page. In the near future, you’ll have the option to keep your Scoop.it page private if you prefer to use it for your team only. Here’s an example of a Scoop.it page.

You start by entering keywords for your topic, and Scoop.it automatically pulls content from a number of major web and social media sources (you can delete those you don’t want). You can then add your own sources, like specialized blogs, individual Twitter accounts, and more.

For each piece of content, you can add your own comments, which is very useful if you want to point out to your team why you selected an item and what you want them to get out of it. You can also create posts from scratch.

Scoop.it’s still in beta, and has some shortcomings in terms of user experience and functionality, plus it needs to give users more control over the appearance of their pages, but it is still quite usable.

You don’t need a curation platform to curate

The sites that have been curating since before everybody was calling it that use tools that were already out there to get the job done. If none of the ready-made platforms work for you, don’t forget that you can, for example, create RSS feeds based on keywords in Google Blog and News search, and from there curate and furnish your selected content manually in a number of ways.

Copyright

The idea of curation isn’t to steal other people’s content in its entirety and use their work to draw traffic to your site. That would be unethical and illegal, even if you credited them. If you’re sharing your curated content with the public, you need to be sure that what you share with the public falls within the bounds of fair use and link to the complete, original content at its source.

If you read French, I highly recommend Pierre Tran’s companion article to the table he created on curation platforms (Le Guide de la curation (3) – les outils), and another table he created on automated publishing platforms (those with no manual filtering) in English and French.

If you’re already curating for your team, please let us know about your tools and workflow in the comments.

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Don’t you generally like to know what’s going on in your work collaborations? I know my students do. In experiential exercises we do as part of class, term after term, my working professional MBA students (they come to class straight from their real-world jobs) demonstrate that they want transparency from their collaborators. Students who are initially left out of planning sessions can become disengaged, and even confrontative. And they are less interested in participating even if eventually invited in. These experienced professionals report that they would prefer to have the news on the table, even when it’s bad, where they can better manage it and prepare for the ramifications.

On the other hand, those students playing roles in experiential exercises where they can withhold information, often do so. When asked why they weren’t transparent with their collaborators, they generally offer one of these reasons:

• It would take too much time to involve the others
• They plan to involve the worker team … once they (in the role of the management team) have planned what work needs to be done
• It would be uncomfortable to share, so tacitly acting on the information is better than being explicit

This kind of thinking is usually counter-productive. Strategist Nilofer Merchant writes in her book, The New How:

Everyone is better off when they know why decisions are made with as much accuracy as possible. It gives them an understanding of what matters and provides information on which to base the trade-offs constantly being made at every level. It also boosts buy-in and energy from the organization. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions can seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving. That is, they may seem like they are made for the good of the decision makers, rather than the good of the organization.

Warren Bennis, business professor and co-author of Transparency: Creating a Culture of Candor, offers evidence that transparency supports financial success: “Again and again, studies show that companies that rate high in transparency tend to outperform more opaque ones.” He cites a 2005 study finding that a group of 27 U.S. companies noted as “most transparent” beat the S&P 500 by 11.3 percent.

Like the effective companies in the study, teams in my class that share inevitably outperform those that do not. In one of the exercises, transparency is the difference between a creative outcome due to the unique information held by the “worker” team and a drawn-out, brute-force solution that’s worse for everyone. The faster the management team shares the task requirements, the quicker the worker team is to trigger the creative solution to this intricate puzzle building task. Performance goes from complete failure, or a 10-minute build, to as fast as 11 seconds.

So if transparency is nearly always the best approach, should you always immediately share everything with your collaborators? No. My advice is to stop and look first. Then if you can reasonably do so, share at least the main features of the situation. You’ll find that it is easier to explain the details once you understand the background and perspective of your collaborators and they understand yours. You may also be surprised that your collaborators have wonderful advice even if they are not hierarchically in a position where you would expect the insight. Finally, listen. Learn from this experience and setting in order to improve on the next collaboration.

Are you seeing a change in management practice?  Do you feel that the last few years have provided more or less transparency in your collaborations? For better or for worse?

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