Building a team culture where the best ideas win - Ray Dalio radical transparency

Building a team culture where the best ideas win is any leader’s top priority. Would you like to do it for your teams? When I ask this question to leaders – almost everyone raises their hand. When it comes to knowing how to create such a culture and commit to investing time, energy, and effort to achieve those goals – leaders are not so clear. Ray Dalio and his radical transparency have successfully built a team culture where the best ideas win and has grown his company to be the largest hedge fund in the world.

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Harsh email feedback

Take a look at the following email. It is harsh feedback given by one employee Jim to another employee Ray – in a large company.

From: Jim

To: Ray D

Cc: Lionel K, Greg J, Randal S, David A

Subject: Feedback on meeting

“Ray – you deserve a “D-” for your performance today in the meeting … you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized. In the future, I/we would ask you to take some time and prepare, and maybe even I should come up and start talking to you to get you warmed up or something, but we can’t let this happen again. If you in any way think my view is wrong, please ask the others, or we can talk about it.”

Regards

Who is giving feedback and to whom?

What is your guess about the designations of Jim and Ray? One would assume that Jim must be the boss and Ray must report to him. Hence the harsh feedback from the boss Jim to his employee Ray, regarding his bad performance during a meeting. This is what happens in most organizational cultures, where a senior person gives such a candid feedback to someon junior.

Well, that assumption would be wrong! In this case, it is exactly the opposite! Jim Haskel works for and reports to Ray Dalio, and Ray is the founder of Bridgewater Associates. Started as a small firm in 1975 from his apartment, Bridgewater Associates is now the world’s largest hedge fund with more than $160 billion assets under management. Ray Dalio himself is worth a cool $18 billion.

In most organizations, no employee would dare to share such critical feedback with someone higher up the corporate ladder. If they did send such a critical e-mail to their company’s founder, they probably would get fired! But Ray Dalio did not fire Jim. Instead, he shared this critical email internally with all the employees. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he then shared it openly at a TED talk for the entire world to see! You can watch Ray Dalio’s radical transparency TED Talk. Ray understands that to build a team culture that learns, innovates and grows, radical transparency is essential!

Why would a top leader ask for such candid feedback?

Why do you think Ray would do something like this? Was he out of his mind? Not really! It is one of the guiding principles Ray Dalio follows at Bridgewater Associates. He calls it radical transparency. He encourages employees to openly share real-time feedback with anyone, irrespective of designations.

However, there is a catch. Share the feedback with the respective person – not with others. If they catch an employee talking behind someone’s back three times – she can be fired! All meetings at Bridgewater Associates are recorded on video and seen and critiqued by anyone inside the company.

Ray Dalio has the emotional intelligence to understand that leaders cannot improve without a culture of honest feedback. Building a team culture requires honest feedback. Leadership coaching and leadership development have a responsibility to create awareness in the leaders that feedback is important. As Ken Blanchard puts it – Feedback is the breakfast of champion leaders!

Ray Dalio and Radical Transparency principle

Ray Dalio credits this principle of radical transparency for the success of his company. A culture of 100% honesty allows all ideas to be discussed and debated. Ideas may win based on their merits and not based on the designation or the influence of the person presenting the idea. Dalio says that this meritocracy of ideas has allowed Bridgewater to think independently and sprint ahead of many well-established fund houses to become the largest and most successful hedge fund in the world. Ray Dalio has built a team culture and his company where the best ideas win – by creating a culture of open and honest feedback through his radical transparency principle. One of the most important leadership skills to develop is to be able to give and receive honest and constructive feedback. Imagine the employee engagement in any company where the leader solicits and accepts such honest and constructive feedback.

Successful companies build a team culture of sharing honest feedback.

Bridgewater Associates is not alone in implementing a culture of honest feedback where everyone’s performance, and ideas, are shared and debated openly, leading to improved performance and meritocracy of ideas. Pixar is another company that credits its success to having a culture of candid feedback. Google founder Larry Page believes in brutally honest feedback. The purpose is to arrive at the best possible solution for a specific problem. Honest feedback allows all ideas to be discussed and debated to find the best solution. In today’s fast-changing and VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, it is crucial to be agile and nimble. Without a culture of honesty, transparency, and open feedback, it would be difficult to stay ahead of the curve.

Read Team coaching – Everything you wanted to know about it.

Build a team culture of candid feedback in your organization

Would you like to improve the performance of your company?
Will you like to sprint ahead of your competitors?
Would you like your teams to be more innovative and change-ready?
Then you need to improve the transparency in your organization?
How is the quality of feedback in your organization?
Do teams share feedback openly?
Do the best ideas win? Or are people afraid to speak their minds?
Do they talk about the “elephant in the room” – the difficult problem and the real issue everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about? Or do they just beat around the bush?
The equation is simple!

Read –Organizational Culture Change Example – Alan Mulally Ford Turnaround Story

Good leadership behaviors = Open and transparent culture = Business performance.

Would you like to improve the quality of the feedback within your organization’s teams and improve the engagement and performance of your employees and the team culture? We offer Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching TEAM coaching – a yearlong intervention that helps create a culture of sharing open feedback. In fact, it delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth for the teams.

We offer our New Age Leadership – NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching.

That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder-centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.

Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results! : We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.