Week 12 Day 4: The Power of Showing Your Team the Real Numbers

Most leaders share business information through filtered summaries -- 'revenue grew this quarter' or 'we need to watch costs.' These statements are true but useless. They give the team no actionable information. When you share the actual numbers -- the specific revenue figure, the exact cost breakdown, the precise margin percentage -- you give your team the same decision-making power that you have. That is the point.

There is a fear that sharing real numbers will cause panic or demotivation. In my experience, the opposite is true. I once shared our actual burn rate with the team during a difficult quarter. I expected anxiety. What I got was problem-solving. Within a week, three engineers had independently identified cost-saving opportunities I had missed. One found a database query that was costing us four hundred dollars a month in unnecessary compute. Another proposed consolidating two redundant services that would save sixty hours of maintenance per quarter. The third renegotiated a vendor contract because he happened to know someone at the competing provider. None of this would have happened if I had simply said 'we need to reduce costs.' They needed the specific number to feel the specific urgency. The team that sees real numbers develops real ownership. The team that sees summaries develops summary-level engagement.

The impact of financial transparency on team performance is supported by Stack's (1992) open-book management experiments at Springfield ReManufacturing, where sharing detailed financial information with all employees correlated with a 15x increase in company valuation over ten years. Davis (2010) replicated these findings across 30 companies implementing open-book practices, finding average revenue growth 2.5 times higher than industry peers. The psychological mechanism is explained by Deci and Ryan's (1985) Self-Determination Theory: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the three drivers of intrinsic motivation. Sharing real numbers addresses all three -- it grants autonomy (the ability to make informed decisions), builds competence (understanding the business context), and strengthens relatedness (being trusted with sensitive information). The fear of sharing 'scary' numbers reflects what Edmondson (1999) calls a failure of psychological safety, but paradoxically, withholding information erodes safety further by creating an environment where people sense that bad news is being hidden.