Transparency: a Universally Employable (UE) Principle

How is transparency a Universally Employable (UE) principle? Choices reveal the character of living beings. Although not always made with careful thought, choices are, nonetheless, windows into one's personal hierarchy of needs. Choices made in public, in the light [of day], are transparent and declarative: this is who I am, what I believe, and I want everyone to know it.

Consider identity theft and internet use. Are you more at risk when you fly under the radar or when you establish a known and quantifiable history? If your geo-tag and purchasing choices correspond to a certain pattern, and suddenly there is a change, an anomaly, your credit card fraud department will contact you for confirmation of charges and may temporarily suspend your account. In this case, a transparent history protects you from further harm. That is not, however, the case for largely self-published content on social networking websites and blogs.

Without a third party gatekeeper to track patterns of lexicon use and the subtle magic of your irreplaceable and unique voice, you now have two jobs to do every time you log in: add content, and vet or edit elements of your profile or content that others have added to your site or blog. Do you think about that, about how the reputation of an acquaintance, or even the friend of a friend can be perceived as revealing something about your character? It is not such a leap of logic to imagine a potential client or employer asking, “If someone like that is in your circle, tell me what does that say about you”?

In my case, recent college class assignments require that I “birth” pre-mature business ideas and create public social network contacts that I otherwise may not have chosen – and to do so transparently, using my real contact information on public websites. Within the relative safety of our online class discussion board, some of my classmates and I vent our angst – and yet, we comply. Some of us plow forward with our real businesses, simultaneously uploading our vision, mission, and profile statements with an elegant and wordy mea culpa for incomplete content. Yet others create “bogus” online businesses, some seem to drop out of the class each week, and a few of us discuss the cost/benefit ratio of not uploading nascent ideas “that would compromise our reputations, just to get a grade.” What is it about me that I understand the assignment to require reality, when others read into it other options?

What do perceptions and their resulting choices say about each of our individual hierarchy of needs? Where am I on Maslow’s pyramid1?

- My Physiological Needs are well met.

- The difficult decision I made in my youth, thinking it would ensure my Safety and Security, proved unsafe but it is still economically valid for the 2010 economy; now, having chosen safety above security, I have a reasonable measure of both. In claiming my own safety, I gained empathy for the physical and psychological safety of others: I became more conscious of how my choices affect the environment and the feelings of others.

- And in becoming more “green” two things happened: my Social network grew, and my existing relationships became deeper, more mutually additive, more open and honest – more transparent.

- Friends and family tell me they regard with Esteem the courage (from coeur, French for heart) of my new career. True esteem is an equilateral equation: esteem of others must equal self-esteem; otherwise (either due to action, inaction or perception) one’s accomplishment, social recognition and sense of personal worth will be false. Esteem, therefore, can only be based upon Truth.

- Ah, here I am, at Truth. I choose Truth, not for the esteem of others (read “grade”), but for the benefit of my own journey, my Self-Actualization. I choose to use this opportunity to learn new skills and to also learn a new “way and how and why to learn.”

Interestingly, this choice is furthering a lifelong search to compile and codify principles of Universal Education: Universally Employable learning principles and skills used to Understand Everything. The fact that I perceive assignments to require realistic transparency is, in itself, revealing of my understanding of the Transparency Principle: For a fact or idea to have meaning, it must first be understood in context, illuminated under one light, a unifying light under which to compare and contrast it with others.

Transparency: UE Exercise

Ask who is in your “light,” what illuminates and unifies the vision, and what does that say about you? Now, having asked those questions, use the microscope of language to further define first the reality and then the corresponding perceptions of:

- Your light: where and how it shines on your various circles of friends, colleagues, and competitors (just what you do, not its effect),

- How you choose to illuminate certain qualities: geography, ideology, needs, goals and the matrix of choices that co-create interconnected lives and how, as René Dubos describes, the “people in [your] place become organic, … and [thereby] contribute to the persistence of its character”2

- Shadows and lines, foreground and background, vibrancy of colors cool and warm; unifying patterns of perception and engagement as described by Michel de Montaigne, who wrote, “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own,” and within it, an opportunity to make himself into a “great and glorious masterpiece.”

- Your transparency: your truth about who and where you are in relation to others in the pattern, your “sense of place”2 on the map of humanity.

Lori GuberaStengel
Founder, GreenLight UE
http://www.greenlightue.com

1. Cherry, K. (2010). Theories of Personality. About.com. Retrieved April 10, 2010, from http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm
2. Dubos, R. (1972). A God Within. (1st ed.). New York NY: Charles Scribners' Sons.