How much information do you Share with employees and how much should you?

The article who's link is below, brought to mind numerous issues on this topic. First, to be clear, transparency is good, but at times too much transparency may not be. It is finding the balance and evaluating the issues involved, which determine how much information to give out. The ramifications can be far reaching and should not be taken lightly.

Two cases in point based on real situations in my past experience:

1) A senior executive who was a country/regional manager was going to be relieved of his responsibilities. His replacement was en-route to the country to inform him, and take over the position....he passed away on the plane. The company did not have anyone else with the right experience to replace the country/regional manager. As it turned out he was never replaced, and in fact was moved back to corporate headquarters and retired as a Senior Executive VP.

Imagine if the Senior Executive would have known that he was going to be replaced? We would have lost an excellent executive or, had he known he was to be relieved, he might have soon moved to another company or had bad morale. As it turned out, it worked out well for both parties.

So not having total transparency might have been the best policy in this case. You decide.

2) We were a major producer of a commodity chemical. We had gone to the industry we were supplying and asked for increases in prices and volumes in order to help us stay in business. This was being driven by regulations and new regulations that were to be imposed on manufacturers in the State in question. Our customers weren't responsive or receptive to our proposal. Consequently, it was decided that we would shut down the plant due to environmental costs which were prohibitive and with impending additional regulations and required investments, the product line would not be able to obtain a return sufficient to make the hurdle rates required.

Being a responsible supplier, we went to our customers and informed them that we would provide adequate product for a year so that they could slowly replace our supply with other supplier's product. We would keep our employees for the year to operate the plant.

We just wanted our customers to know so that there would not be a disruption in supply when we shut down. Within less than 6 months, we had no sales and had to shut down much sooner than we had expected. This negatively affected our employees sooner than might have been the case, had we not informed our customers of our intentions. As a result our employees had to look for new positions sooner than anyone expected.

So transparency in this case may not have been the best approach, at least to give customers this much lead-time. You decide.

How Much Information Do You Share with Employees?:
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/how-much-information-do-you-share-with-employees/?ref=business