I’ve been part of organizations that said they wanted transparency, and they really meant it. There were dashboards, regular update meetings, and channels for open discussions. At first glance, it looked like everything you’d need to make work visible.
And yet decisions still happened quietly. People didn’t speak up in discussions and hesitated to ask questions. Meetings felt muted, and when someone asked, “Does anybody have anything to add?” the silence answered for everyone. Learning didn’t happen.
Over the years, I’ve learned one thing: you can’t enforce transparency; you can only invite it. And that invitation only works when people feel safe being seen.
When Transparency Meets Fear
Fear changes what people do with visibility. When openness feels unsafe, people start performing. They share updates that sound good, not ones that are useful. They polish documents instead of writing what they actually think. They start managing how they look instead of what they learn.
I’ve seen teams where everyone knew what was wrong but nobody said it out loud. Retros filled with polite noise. Pull requests where decisions appeared fully formed, context long gone. From the outside, everything looked transparent, but inside, everyone was hiding.
That’s the paradox: the more you demand transparency from a fearful team, the less of it you actually get. Transparency without safety isn’t transparency at all; it’s surveillance.
What Safety Actually Means
Psychological safety is not about comfort. It’s about being able to show uncertainty without paying for it. It’s knowing you can ask the stupid question, or point out a risk, and not end up being the risk yourself.
Amy Edmondson described this dynamic in The Fearless Organization: teams that feel safe learn faster. Google’s Project Aristotle found the same thing: safety isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the single strongest predictor of performance.
But long before the data proves it, you can feel it. You can tell when a team is safe because people start their sentences with “I might be wrong, but…” and everyone leans in instead of looking away.
How Safety Enables Transparency
When people feel safe, visibility stops being dangerous. They share work early, surface problems sooner, and stop hiding the messy middle. That’s where the real value of transparency lives: not in dashboards or KPIs, but in the ability to tell the truth before it’s convenient.
Blameless postmortems, open RFCs, and public retros all depend on trust. They only work if people believe that honesty won’t be used against them. Otherwise, they just become rituals of pretend openness. Trust turns visibility into learning. Without it, openness becomes theatre.
The Leader’s Part in This
As leaders, we don’t create safety by saying “you can speak freely.” We create it by showing what happens next. When someone raises a concern, do we thank them or defend the plan? When a mistake surfaces, do we look for who did it, or what system made it easy to do?
One of the teams I led was afraid of breaking things. They waited for permission to act. Every decision went through three approvals just to avoid blame. Once we stopped treating errors as personal failures, everything changed. People started sharing problems early. Retros turned into real discussions instead of post-event paperwork. Transparency followed naturally, not because we asked for it, but because people felt safe enough to give it.
Try This
If you want to see how safe your team really feels, run a retro with one simple rule: no names. Talk about signals, systems, and decisions - nothing personal. You’ll notice the tone shift immediately. That’s psychological safety in action. And once it’s there, transparency starts to work for real.