Radical transparency is a management method where nearly all conversation and decision making is carried out publicly. According to Clive Thompson’s article The See-Through CEO Southwest Airlines has an internal blog on which employees ranging from marketing executives to ticket agents post about their jobs and personal lives. When CEO Gary Kelly posted about Southwest possibly adopting assigned seating – ending its first come, first seated policy – more than 600 people commented. At firms like Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh experiments with levels of disclosure that most executives would consider inappropriate. One example is their internal wiki that allows staff members to complain about problems and suggest solutions.

This morning I had a break-through conversation with the CEO of one of our clients. Through the course of our intervention this organization has spent millions of dollars, taken people out of the field for days at a time and expended valuable time and resources to distribute the message of inclusion in a meaningful way. Yesterday though, he got feedback about an incident that happened out in the field from some people who have not yet been involved in any of the work or education regarding inclusion. Since one of the individuals involved was considered by the others to be “a friend” of the CEO there was a feeling that nothing should be said to him. The unspoken message was that the person involved should be handled with kids gloves because of his friendship with the CEO. The key element of the incident though was that the individuals affected by this incident thought that senior management, including the CEO, talked a big game around inclusion but really didn’t care; that the CEO had a sliding scale of inclusive values when it came to the old ways and those with whom he had a personal relationship, yet this could not be further from the truth.

One of the most difficult parts of working with organizations is keeping leaders engaged when there is a ripple effect in terms of how long it takes the new inclusive culture, mindsets and behaviors to reach people in their day to day lives. For senior leaders like this CEO who are taking time away from running the day to day business and expending tremendous resources, not to mention taking personal risks to challenge and evolve their own thinking, mindsets and behaviors, it’s terribly frustrating for them to hear that there persists a perception that they don’t care. Additionally, these same core leaders will feel as if their efforts are not only going unrecognized, but that the overwhelming reaction of the people of the organization is that they aren’t doing anything at all; that the work on inclusion is nothing but lip service for appearance sake.

To keep the senior management team engaged and effectively communicate the efforts around inclusion across the organization I recommended to this client that he open up, be honest, show that he cares and reach directly to the stakeholders in such a way that is shocking and against the old way of thinking that pervades the organization’s culture. I recommended that he, like other CEOs struggling with difficult issues, start Blogging to circumvent the effects of the lag time.

The real issue is that people within the organization don’t feel the change or even realize change is occurring around them because as Kaleel used to say, “Change in the middle feels like failure.” There is a natural lag time, or rather a disconnect, between when leaders feel like they’re making change and when change becomes evident.

Social networking platforms such as blogs can engage a younger audience while providing an opportunity for leaders to think differently about how they connect with their people—and likewise how their people connect with them. They also provide an opportunity for leaders to express real emotion and to pull back the curtain of their mythological image and reveal their true selves to their people while fighting the organizational “mythologies” and old mindsets about them.

By blogging candidly and truthfully about not only incidents like the one that just occurred, but also about his reaction to them and about the continuing efforts to create a more inclusive environment for all its people there would be shortening of the timeline between when the leaders start to change and when the organization catches up.