Back to Transform 2026 Sessions Dashboard

The Transparency Advantage: What the Best Communicators Are Doing Differently

At Transform 2026, one pattern showed up across 73 sessions: companies that communicate honestly move through change faster. They also earn more trust doing it. Here's what they're actually doing.

When companies choose to be more honest with their employees, things get better. Retention improves. Change moves faster. Employee trust grows.

That pattern showed up at Transform 2026 again and again. The conference had 185 speakers, 73 talks, and one clear finding. The best communicators aren't doing anything fancy. They choose honesty. Then they build systems to keep it going.

The sessions were specific. Executives described real changes they made. They explained what moved their teams from broken communication to something that actually worked. What follows is the clearest picture from those three days.

Transparency Isn't a Value. It's an Organizational Design Problem. And That's Good News.

The most argued-over idea at this year's conference came from the packed "Inside the Glass Office" session. Most companies treat transparency as a value. They write it in a values document. Leaders talk about it at all-hands meetings. Then it fades when things get hard.

The speakers argued this approach is exactly why transparency efforts fail.

"When I think about transparency, I think of it less about a value that we need to espouse, and it's more of how are we designing transparency into our teams, into our organizations, so that we can move quicker, we can do better work, and just be better positioned to handle change and uncertainty."

— Christopher Westcott, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

When transparency is a value, it gets pushed aside when things are tough. When it's a design principle, it sticks. You build it into how your team communicates. You build it into how decisions get made. You build it into how information flows. The system carries it forward.

This changes the key question. Don't ask, "How do we get leaders to be more transparent?" Ask instead, "Where does our structure make honesty harder than it needs to be?" That's a problem you can fix. Companies that have fixed it see real gains in speed and employee trust.

The Courage to Say "I Don't Know," and Why It Works

Leaders who say "I don't know" earn more trust than leaders who fake confidence. It makes sense to want to seem certain during hard times. But employees can tell the difference between real confidence and performed confidence. When they spot the act, they stop trusting the source.

"For me, radical transparency as it relates to where I am today — it is treating people like adults. And we oftentimes make concessions to have communications fit perfectly and tell every story, and at the end of the day, we are all adults in the room, and we should be able to handle the truth, and it needs to be framed in a way that ultimately treats us like adults."

— Tracy Ting, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

The "Inside the Glass Office" panelists were clear about what "treating people like adults" looks like. Share what you know. Be direct about what you don't know. Don't dress up uncertainty as strategy. That last part is where most internal communications break down.

"People are adults. Employees are adults. They are OK when you say, 'I don't know.' In fact, they will probably find you more authentic and more relatable when you do that rather than just, tell me stuff that you think I want to hear."

— Laura Agharkar, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

The best communicators run a simple check before sending anything. One executive described it plainly:

"What's the bullshit indicator here? Like, when is the — like, is the employee going to read right through this? Like, that to me is, I always have that lens when we are thinking about communications, you know, rolling things out."

— Speaker, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

That's quality control. The best internal comms teams ask one question before any message goes out. Will this survive your most skeptical employee?

The Unexpected Communication Playbook from the Los Angeles Lakers

The most surprising session in the internal communications track came from NBA legend James Worthy. His talk was "Building a Championship Mindset: Lessons in Leadership, Teamwork, and Accountability." Without a single piece of HR vocabulary, Worthy described a listening structure that most organizations would benefit from copying directly.

"We had this format that we call circle of communication. Whenever we had issues with our team, we all sit around in a circle and we all gave each other 2 minutes, 2 minutes uninterrupted to say what you wanted to say. And we never started with Magic Johnson. We never started with Kareem. We never started with myself. We always started with the guys who never got to play, guys who were practice players, because they had been witnessing what it is that we've been going through."

— James Worthy, "Building a Championship Mindset: Lessons in Leadership, Teamwork, and Accountability" (Featured Track)

One of the highest-profile teams in NBA history chose to start with the players who never played. Those players had been watching. They could see things the stars were too close to notice.

The lesson for organizations is clear. The people most likely to give you accurate feedback on your culture are the least likely to be asked. Junior staff, support roles, departments that never present to the executive team: they see a lot. The strongest communicating organizations find structured ways to hear from them. Not a suggestion box. A designed, recurring, genuinely listened-to process.

Repetition Isn't Nagging. It's the Whole Strategy.

Leaders often say, "I've already said this." Then they move on. That instinct is almost always wrong. The best communicators have stopped fighting repetition. They build it in by design.

"You're gonna be saying things 27 times in 27 different channels in 27 different ways. Yes, you're gonna be answering the same question over and over and over, but consistency and repetition and not giving up are gonna ultimately be your biggest allies."

— Christopher Westcott, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

Twenty-seven times, twenty-seven channels, twenty-seven different ways. This isn't about attention spans. It's how people process information during change or uncertainty. The best teams treat repetition as the strategy itself, not as a sign something went wrong.

The "Power of HR: What It Takes to Lead the Future of Work" session added a key point on channel selection. A Slack message reaches a different mental state than an all-hands meeting. A written FAQ does a different job than a live Q&A. Even the same words land differently in writing, in conversation, and in a back-and-forth exchange. High-performing communications teams map their message across all three on purpose.

When Stories Win and Data Doesn't

The "Measuring the True Return on Your Social Impact Initiatives" panel made a case that applies far beyond social impact programs. Stories move people in ways data can't. Most internal comms teams underuse this badly.

"What really, for us, is impact is where we're hearing stories about people who come back, and we actually relay those stories."

— Kendra Ross, "Measuring the True Return on Your Social Impact Initiatives" (Culture + Belonging Track)

Companies publish engagement scores and eNPS results. Then they wonder why employees aren't energized. Data tells people what is happening. Stories tell them why it matters. Most internal comms leans heavily on metrics and skips the human moment that gives the metric meaning. The best communicators correct that imbalance.

"Inside the Glass Office" had a practical answer to that. Not every leader tells stories well. The fix isn't a storytelling training program. Find the people in your organization who can carry a narrative. They don't have to be executives. Build your communications around their strengths.

"Not all leaders are good storytellers. Some are horrible storytellers. So pick the good ones to help you champion or explain."

— Laura Agharkar, "Inside the Glass Office: Building Radical Transparency" (Featured Track)

How the Best Communicators Handle the Hard Moments

"Rebuilding Trust When Tough Decisions Have Broken It" made a case worth sitting with. Hard decisions don't break employee trust. Layoffs, restructurings, strategy pivots: employees can accept difficult choices. What they can't accept is feeling misled about them.

"What breaks trust isn't the thing, it's how you react to it."

— Julie Bank, "Rebuilding Trust When Tough Decisions Have Broken It" (Featured Track)

This gives leaders more control than they often think. The decision may be unavoidable. The communication around it is not. Direct or vague. Honest or obscure. That's the variable companies can actually control.

"Trust isn't an exercise in communication, it's a leadership practice."

— Shannon Kirk, "Rebuilding Trust When Tough Decisions Have Broken It" (Featured Track)

The panel's point: trust builds in small moments, not big announcements. Every one-on-one conversation counts. Every decision explained rather than handed down counts. Every promise kept counts. No single communication replaces that steady practice.

"You lose trust in a moment, and it takes a long time to gain it back."

— Julie Bank, "Rebuilding Trust When Tough Decisions Have Broken It" (Featured Track)

The social impact panel raised one more point. Companies that stand for something clear, and hold to it when things get uncomfortable, build a reserve of trust. That reserve makes everything they communicate more effective. Once employees spot a gap between stated values and actual behavior, every future message gets filtered through doubt.

"If you're not upsetting at least 30 to 40% of the people, you're not standing for something that matters. And if you're not willing to do it when things get hard, you're not standing for something that mattered to you in the first place — it was performative."

— Dean Carter, "Measuring the True Return on Your Social Impact Initiatives" (Culture + Belonging Track)

The communicators who stood out at Transform 2026 didn't have the most polished messaging. They had messaging that reflected something real. Real decisions. Real tradeoffs. Uncertainty named honestly. Employees recognize that. And it earns the trust that makes change possible.

---