Organizational Transparency
In the February 2026 blog, I discussed the importance of transparency in Leadership Communications. At OCOM, we strongly believe in transparent communications, as appropriate. Indeed, this has been an area that we have hardwired into the organizational DNA, as possible.
When I was an associate dean at Campbell University’s medical school in North Carolina over a decade ago, I had a visit to a health system that influenced me deeply. I visited Wilmington Health, a health system in the Coastal Carolinas area that was having exceptional outcomes. In a meeting with the CEO, he shared that all of their providers had transparent access to their quality outcome data. He shared that healthcare providers care about providing quality care and when they see their data, they have a tendency to improve over time (even if their initial responses are defensive). I believe that folks working in academic medicine (and probably nearly every other industry) care about quality and genuinely want to do good and having transparency with the data is one of the most important opportunities to drive quality improvement - with this good intent, data manages itself.
In the book, “AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Superintelligent Firm” by Jonathan Brill and Stephen Wunker, they discussed in the age of AI the need for organizations to have units with some degree of autonomy. This necessitates a significant amount of transparency within an organization to ensure that everyone is operating with shared knowledge, goals, and alignment.
French and Raven described six forms of power: coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert, and informational. Informational power is one that I see individuals in organizations often try to hoard in the attempt to increase their personal power and then leverage that knowledge for personal gains. The antidote for this type of behavior is to create organizations where knowledge is transparent, where appropriate. It levels the playing field and the culture grows to expect transparency. A transparent environment also fosters high trust cultures.
At OCOM we do a number of things to foster a culture of transparency (where appropriate) and high trust as follows (just a few examples):
Digital Dashboards: Every employee can access digital dashboards on the Intranet and we also post them in the Employee Lounge in the digital screens.
Monthly Newsletters to Team and Students: We send out detailed monthly newsletters to the team that have sections for every leader to report out. This encourages transparent organizations.
State of OCOM (All-Hands Meeting): We have a quarterly all hands meeting where we share updates from leadership and various leaders to all employees.
Digital Screens: On digital signage throughout the organization, we post welcome messages for all of our VIP visitors as well as important events.
Website & Intranet: Our website and Intranet are loaded with extensive information about OCOM, including all of our policies, team members, and relevant information about OCOM. I think you would find it difficult to find out as much transparent information on a website for any other medical school, compared to OCOM.
Leading a medical school of the future requires significant transparency and heavy lifting in terms of transparent communication. I believe that all of us should lead our professional and personal lives with significant transparency because this is what folks expect in our modern society.
