We’re often told the lessons above are good principles to follow in life. Be honest (transparent), treat everyone the sa

The image above is a screenshot of my CEO’s calendar. It contains business as well as personal events. He always saves it all up under his company email, so everybody can see what he was up to on the general google calendar.

If there is one most important thing I learned from my CEO, it is this: transparency. He taught me and other employees how important it is to let your people know about what is happening at the company, as much as possible. Of course you can’t tell everything to everyone, some information has to remain confidential. But a lot of the times, you can be a lot more transparent than you would rather be.

The answer was yes. It had been months and months of total mayhem at work, and the team dynamics were just not working. The main problem being the person in charge of the cohesion: the manager. It was nothing personal, it was a fact, everybody knew it, and it was starting to turn very ugly. Somebody had to do something.

I hear stories from friends complaining about the total lack of transparency at their work. They don’t know how good or how bad of a situation their company is in. They don’t know what kind of financial targets have to be reached. This creates a stressful environment by default, because everybody is always trying to be at 100%, without knowing the required level of productivity. Especially during these challenging economic times, this is not a very viable system.

For some some confidential business meetings, he made sure to set the settings to not display the title of the meeting and/or the attendees. But again, you can never be 100% transparent, especially as the company keeps growing and you’re looking at a potential acquisition. Information can’t leak.

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I could look back to my original research notes and see I had ignored several fatal warnings. I had listened to what they said — exactly as they said it, but I did not realize until much later that I failed to actually understand what they meant.

The structure of our company always helped transparency. We remained a small company until our recent acquisition (30–50 employees). It is no secret that the more people get involved, the harder it is to keep everyone in the know, and to make sure nothing leaks.

Whether it was the financial health of our small startup, having to let go of some people, or the targets each team had to reach to maintain the company afloat (especially at the peak of the corona pandemic), our CEO always did his best to tell us everything he was allowed to tell us. He didn’t hide behind corporate responsibility excuses to obstruct relevant information, and I’ll remember this lesson for the rest of my professional career.

Except for a few times where things really went south and he lost his temper (which in a way is also a way to be transparent), I never saw him treat people a specific way based on who they were.

He recognised that the 2 strongest components of the team (myself an another person), who had been here the longest and were performing the best, could not be sacrificed to bad management. What’s more, these 2 people were really close from resigning if something was not done about the situation.

It’s not a rule to not pay yourself when you start a company. This will depend on the financial health of your project, but in many cases, you won’t see a lot of money coming into your checking account during the launch phase. In the case of my CEO, he didn’t make a dime for the first 2 years at his job. He is the founder and CEO, he created his company from the ground up, and he had no option but to reinvest all the money made into further development, at least in the beginning.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon right in the middle of last year. I was at home, relaxing, when I got a call from my CEO. I hesitated to take it, but I also knew that following the recent set of events at the company, he had to talk to me. I took the call. 10 minutes into the conversation, he asked me point blank: “Should I fire your manager?”

I say this is the number one most important thing he taught me because I can tell from my experience at other companies, and from what I heard from people at other companies, that the way my CEO was being transparent majorly influenced the way the company moved forward.

I was expecting this call from my CEO, because I had sent him an email the day before, asking for a meeting. But I couldn’t believe he was literally asking me this question: “Should I fire your manager?”. We had a very open discussion about the whole situation, we explained everything to each other. It was honest, transparent, and at the end of the day my CEO made the right decisions, because he recognised the value of people.

Whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company with thousands of employees, or the CEO of a 50-people startup, you never have an excuse to not treat everyone the same way.