Trust implies you are with me and not against me. But how to do you signal that you are trustworthy?  Turns out that trust has two opposing elements. Sometimes it is about what you share, sometimes about what you don’t share.

In my work, I encounter projects that must be kept protected from prying eyes.  Yet, many times I work on projects where I seek to share information with anyone who will listen or care.  My company trusts me with certain information knowing that I will not share it with the wrong parties.  And I disclose information in certain cases to engender trust by being “transparent.”  Sharing and hiding are two sides of the same trust coin.

I face this question of sharing v.s. non sharing in the context of Open Source projects. Many times the appropriate behavior is obvious.  When we participate in the world of Open Source, we seek to be as transparent as we can.  The Open Source world is well tuned to identify attempts to hide information.  Moreover, the very behavior that makes “Open” source effective is the nature of openness.  On the other hand, when a company engages in Open Source sharing, there is some reality that companies do have secrets.  Moreover, even if something isn’t a secret per se, there are some things you don’t share publicly. Some sharing erodes trust.

I thought about it and realized the following simple model.  We have an indoor voice and an outside voice.  They convey different messages.  Within my company, I’m going to point out some flaws as part of the constructive process of improving things.  This voice is perceived to be trustworthy when my message shows loyalty to the company.  When I’m using an outside voice, I don’t bring attention to flaws, as this would be perceived as disloyal.  Note, I don’t have to become a disingenuous shill.  Let’s be perfectly clear, no company is without flaws.  But when outside the company, my voice is trusted if I’m forthcoming — and yes, also loyal.

Let’s examine what happens when we reverse this. I’ll use the example of a company sponsored Open Source project (but you can extrapolate to other cases).  When working in a public group, if I overly play my loyalty to my company more than my loyalty to the project, then I’ll be considered less trusted by the project.  I have seen cases where participants in Open Source projects act “too corporate” (hiding information, being perceived to have a hidden agenda, etc.) and are rejected by the project members for this. The social sphere (social media, etc.) expects transparency. When we communicate in a less than forthcoming manner, people perceive we are hiding something from them.  This invites distrust.

Consider the opposide. When inside a company, if you convey your bias towards publicity (at the expense of loyalty), then you can invite distrust too!  I have encountered a number of employees who insisted to me that they must share some information publicly since it invites trust — but failed to see how their sharing would actually hurt. For example, one employee told me that he was contributing to a project that another team at Yahoo! was actively contributing to, but refused to work with that team internally since he thought they were idiots and were “doing it wrong.” (I have no opinion as to whether he was correct.) He wanted to fix the problems he found with their project by joining the external community and fixing it in public.  I suggested to him that airing dirty laundry is probably not a ninja-move for someone who wants to get ahead in his career. If he had a problem with the other team within the company, he should address it within the confines of the company.  By going public he’d simply invite a host of other problems. It took him a while to understand that it looks bad to be disloyal, since he sincerely thought that being transparent (about his feelings that the other team were idiots) would invite trust.

I encounter other examples like the one above where people think that oversharing is the only way to earn trust.  It is like exercising one muscle group without paying attention to the opposing muscle group.  Employees who work in the open have to balance two behaviors, being open and being discreet.  When playing the right behavior in the right context, you become incredibly trusted and respected.  When playing the opposite behavior, the reverse happens.  Thus it is less about the behavior of transparency and discretion per se; Trust is earned by understanding when to express the appropriate behavior in the right context.  Both behaviors are essential.

We live in a flawed world full of imperfections. Companies are not perfect. Personal relationships are not perfect. Indeed nothing is perfect. We always seek to improve where we can. Being a trusted partner in the process is a big enabler to working with others and fixing things together.  When on the “inside” you have to demonstrate your loyalty — which implies that you need to protect the honor of your inner circle.  When on the “outside” you have to demonstrate your openness — which implies that you need to reveal your biases, disclose your loyalties, and be forthcoming.

Related posts: The value of Transparency and Trust and Social Media and Can Employees blog with authenticity? (see my answer to this question on the page).

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I was invited to attend a “Breakthrough Leadership Lessons from Top Women Execs” session sponsored by my company’s HR leadership training department.  They invited men and women, though the target audience was for women. The way I saw it “Smart people giving out wisdom, and it’s free.” Sure I’ll be there! And I’m glad I attended.

The setup: Six women leaders in a panel with moderator. Four are CEOs of their companies, one is an SVP at a well known Fortune 100 Tech company, and the other a managing partner at one of the Big four accounting firms. The discussion ranged from the term executive presence as used to help coach women or to subtly turn them away from growth opportunities, to the proverbial work/life balance e.g. how to be a super-mom and woman executive. Funny note: One of the panelists suggested that life would have been easier had she been gay and had a female partner at home. One of the members of the audience commented back from personal experience that it’s still difficult to raise kids and have a full-time job, even with a her wife at home!

There were a few points made at the conference that I thought were worth sharing, and one observation I made on my own that I’ll include below.

• Ask for what you want. One panelist shared that she was employee number 4 at a startup company that grew to be very large, went public, and then was acquired. She was the head of engineering and had a lot of stock and made a nice amount of money at the buy-out. But at the time she learned that the head of marketing had even more stock. So she approached the CEO and asked why that was the case. He said “When we started the company I offered you what I offered you. You took it and did not ask for more. I figured you were happy with the offer.” It did not occur to her that she could ask for more.
• Spend your time deliberately. We all get 168 hours in a week. Whether you are the president of the country, the vice president of a bank, or the person who fills the ATM with a stack of bills every morning, we all have the same 168 hours. We choose how to spend it. We spend it on our work, friends, kids, surfing the web, drooling on the pillow, or watching TV shows. But 168 is it. Successful people don’t get more time than the rest of us, they simply use it carefully. And some of us choose to be more successful outside of work than at work. But we must all own our choices.
• Find a mentor and be a mentor. We don’t magically become great. We learn from others and teach others. Nearly every great speaker you ever heard was professionally coached. Most great leaders were coached. Get coached. And be a coach if you can. It is very rewarding. It helps you and others. They were especially keen to note that teenage girls should be provided access to women leaders in technology and engineering areas. It will make or break the future.

The session was fascinating and informative. I’m grateful that Yahoo! Inc, (the company I work for) invested the time to provide this 90-minute conversation to some of the developing leaders in the company and had opened it up to men and women.

At the very end of the session I realized something else that I think is worth sharing too: I’ve always preferred to work for women managers. I’ve had managers who were good, some who were bad, some were male, some female.   But looking back at the many managers I have had over the years I think that women were better than the men. And I wondered why I felt that way. Was it something about me, a psycho-sexual Freudian thing? A random pattern of very good female managers? Am I alone in this bias or do others feel the same way? And it occurred to me that those women who are great leaders are because they earned it and fought for it. They were mentored and groomed; they proved their worth. Whereas with the male leaders, this was true some of the time, but not all of the time. Thus as a whole, the women on the top of the organizational hierarchy are people you should want to work for. They are probably great leaders. I’m not suggesting that women categorically make better leaders per se. But that women who are successful leaders have probably earned it by overcoming the forces that might have been in their way.

So what do you think about this?

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An often overlooked benefit of open source is its impact on corporate culture. Open source helps corporations engender an ethos of openness which impacts more than code itself. At Yahoo! where I work, and elsewhere, I see three aspects of these changes:

• Information abundance changes the economics of information management.
• OSS can commoditize and standardize platforms, creating new competitive surfaces.
• The dynamics of secrecy and information disclosure reverse, changing a company’s posture of openness.

We are taught that wealth comes from holding on to valuable goods. Companies hire the best talent and protect their information much like they would stockpile money. But information works differently: it gains power when shared. Rather than keeping information, talent, and source code inside my company, we create more value by sharing some of it outside the corporate walls. This enables us to leverage information from the outside to add value internally.

But much like money, the abundance of information supply causes its devaluation. Stockpiling depleting assets is no path to success. Today’s information age provides an abundance of information resources on the public Internet. This further encourages companies to share more and participate in the open. It’s a more economical way to manage information assets. Wealth is no longer the reward of the hoarders, but of the engaged.

A large portion of the code running in any company is commodity code, performing rote tasks that don’t add unique value. Of course, some code expresses our unique competitive advantage that we protect and enhance. Engaging in open source projects forces us to get clarity about which is which. Companies have the incentive to commoditize low-value code and drive down their long-term maintenance costs by getting their peers to share the burden with them. We then implement our unique value-added technology onto the commodity platforms – resulting in greater profitability and competitive advantage.

The strategy that I’m working on in my company is to use standard, open source, commodity technology where we can, and to create defacto and open standards where none exist. We use open source code, contribute fixes where we can, and establish new projects to encourage their wide adoption. It’s sound business practice. And it also helps change our attitudes about code and community.

Traditional companies hire experts to create products in secrecy. But expertise is widely distributed. We can’t and don’t need to hire all the experts in our field. We can attract the contribution of experts, even those who work at competitors, by collaborating openly. As opposed to control and secrecy, we employ tactical transparency where there is mutual benefit. Then we compete in the space above the commodity technology where we have unique advantage.

At Yahoo!, we have applied this thinking to a number of projects and learned a lot in the process. One example is Apache Hadoop – an open source cloud computing data engine that Yahoo! invested considerable talent into creating with the open source community. When we first explored the ideas around Hadoop, we decided that it would be better for us and the industry to work with others to create a defacto standard rather than keep all the technology for ourselves. Not only did we benefit from contributions to the project, we drove down our long-term expenses. Our decision yielded many unanticipated benefits for us too – financially, culturally, and with the developer-community who sees Yahoo! as a technology-thought leader in the very hot tech space of Big Data. We run the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, and are a destination for great minds looking to get into the field of huge-scale data processing – one of the most promising areas for tomorrow’s tech careers.

We begin many new projects with the plan to open source some of the code – forcing us to consider how others would use it, and how to build it for more than just our needs. We approach peers in other companies with ideas about co-development projects in the open. In some cases if we shut down a project, we’ll open source the code so that it can live on elsewhere.

Open source causes us to think differently about the way we invest in the technologies vital to our success. Getting over the “not-invented-here” syndrome and working together, even with some of our fiercest competitors, allows us to create compelling products. And we believe that working in the open helps set us apart and gives us strength to be one of the most ubiquitous and relevant digital media companies on the Internet.

Note:  This is cross-posted on opensourcedelivers.com a new blog sponsored by Blackduck software, a well-known software and service provider in the Open Source space. Allowing them to post my thoughts is not an endorsement of their company per se. Nor do I imply a special corporate relationship between my employer and them. That said, I happen to think they know more than most about the business of Open Source and I personally have much to gain by sharing my thoughts and inviting your participation on their blog, or on this one.  I think you do too.

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