Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Working in the Open
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Working in the Open. Here we go. Theodore Roosevelt put it simply when he said, The leader works in the open and the boss in covert. The leader leads and And the boss drives. It's a short line, but it draws a hard boundary. Not between good managers and bad ones, between two entirely different relationships to power. Think about what working in the open actually requires. It means your reasoning is visible. Your decisions can be traced back to something people can see and question. When you're wrong, everyone knows you were wrong because you made the call in front of them. Covert leadership does not work that way. It moves through side conversations, quiet asks, decisions that arrived without a visible path to how they were made. People feel the outcome before they understand the reasoning, if they ever understand it at all. Here's the leadership moment that brings this home. Picture two managers handling the same hard call a reorg, a budget cut, a project getting killed. The first one calls a meeting, lays out the constraints, explains the trade offs, and takes questions, even the uncomfortable ones. The second sends a message after the decision is already final, framed as though there was never really a choice to make. Both managers land on the same outcome. The org chart looks the same either way. But the people on the receiving end walk away with completely different relationships to that leader. One trusts the process even if they disagree with the result. The other starts guessing at what's really going on, because they've learned that what's said and what's decided are not the same thing. Here's where a lot of people misread this. They think working in the open means constant transparency. A leader has to explain every decision to everyone all the time or narrate their entire thought process out loud. That is not what Roosevelt is describing. Working in the open isn't about the volume of communication, it's about whether the mechanism is visible. A leader can make a fast private call and still be working in the open. As long as the people affected can see how that decision connects to something real. A standard they already agreed to, a set of priorities they already understand, a reasoning they could reconstruct even without being in the room. The boss, by contrast, can talk constantly and still be covert because none of it actually explains anything. It's noise standing in for openness. So the real distinction isn't how much a leader says. It's whether their authority survives being looked at closely. A leader who works in the open has nothing to lose from scrutiny because the scrutiny is the point. A boss who works in covert has everything to lose from it because covert authority depends on nobody looking too hard. This shows up differently now that so much decision making runs through systems nobody in the room can fully see into. A hiring algorithm ranks candidates. A pricing model sets a number. A performance tool flags who's a flight risk. None of these tools explain themselves the way a person can be asked to. And that creates a temptation. Let the system be the covert boss. Point to the score, the flag, the output, and let it stand in for a decision decision nobody has to defend. It's a modern version of the same old move, dressed up as objectivity. The leader's job has not changed. It's still to make the reasoning visible, even when the tool that informed it can't. If a leader cannot explain why a system's recommendation was accepted over or overruled in plain language to the person that it affects, that's covert leadership wearing a technical disguise. The judgment Roosevelt is describing was never about having all the answers. It's about being willing to be seen making the call. Here's what's worth carrying forward. The next time you're able or about to make a decision that affects other people, ask yourself one plain question. Could you stand in front of everyone it touches and walk them through exactly how you got there? Not a polished version, the real one. Trade-offs included. If the answer is yes, you're probably leading. If the answer is no, if some part of the reasoning has to stay hidden for the decision to hold up, that's worth sitting with. That discomfort is usually pointing at something real. Roosevelt drew this line a long time ago and it has not moved. The leader works in the open, the boss works in covert. One of those builds something that lasts, the other only lasts as long as nobody looks too closely.