Executive coaching helps leaders and teams build the openness that drives growth. By strengthening self-awareness, trust, and curiosity, it can turn change into an opportunity for learning and progress.
When Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings publicly admitted the company’s strategic missteps with Qwikster in 2011, many expected shareholder backlash. Instead, his transparent acknowledgement of failure and commitment to learning became a defining moment in building organisational trust and resilience. This exemplifies how executive openness—far from being a vulnerability—becomes a cornerstone of transformational leadership.
In today’s volatile business environment, organisational openness has emerged as a critical differentiator between companies that thrive through change and those that struggle to adapt. For senior executives, developing and modelling openness isn’t just about personal leadership style—it’s about creating organisational cultures capable of innovation, agility, and sustained performance.
Understanding Organisational Openness
Organisational openness encompasses multiple dimensions that successful executives must navigate: transparency in communication, receptiveness to feedback, willingness to admit uncertainty, and creating psychological safety for diverse perspectives. It’s fundamentally about reducing the barriers that prevent information, ideas, and authentic dialogue from flowing throughout the organisation.
This concept goes beyond open-door policies. True organisational openness requires executives to examine their own mental models, challenge established assumptions, and create conditions where difficult conversations can happen.
Consider Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella. By shifting from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture, Nadella modelled intellectual humility that cascaded throughout the organisation, enabling Microsoft to pivot successfully towards cloud computing and collaborative technologies.
The Executive’s Dilemma: Confidence vs. Openness
Many executives face an apparent paradox: stakeholders and team members expect confident, decisive leadership whilst organisational effectiveness increasingly requires openness, vulnerability, and collaborative decision-making. This tension often creates what we call “executive armour”—defensive behaviours that protect individual credibility but limit organisational learning.
Executive coaching plays a crucial role in helping leaders navigate this challenge by developing what we term “confident openness”—the ability to demonstrate strength through curiosity, vulnerability, and genuine engagement with diverse perspectives. This isn’t about appearing weak or indecisive; it’s about modelling the intellectual courage that complex challenges demand.
Research consistently shows that leaders who combine confidence with openness create more innovative, resilient, and engaging organisational cultures. They make better decisions because they access broader information sets, and they build stronger teams because people feel valued and heard.
The Business Case for Executive Openness
The competitive advantages of organisational openness become clear when examining market leaders across industries. Companies with open leadership cultures consistently outperform peers in innovation metrics, employee engagement scores, and adaptability measures.
Amazon’s leadership principles explicitly include “Learn and Be Curious” and “Are Right, A Lot” (which emphasises learning from being wrong). These principles, modelled by senior leadership, have enabled the company to successfully enter diverse markets from cloud computing to healthcare whilst maintaining startup-like innovation speeds.
Similarly, organisations with open leadership cultures demonstrate superior crisis resilience. During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies whose executives had established patterns of transparent communication, collaborative problem-solving, and rapid experimentation adapted more quickly to disrupted markets and remote work challenges.
The business impact extends to talent attraction and retention. Today’s workforce, particularly high-performing professionals, increasingly chooses employers based on cultural factors including leadership authenticity, growth opportunities, and psychological safety—all of which flow from organisational openness.
Developing Executive Openness: The Coaching Journey
For many executives, developing openness represents a fundamental shift from behaviours that previously drove success. Early career advancement often rewards individual expertise, decisive action, and competitive positioning—qualities that can become limiting at senior levels where success depends on collaborative capability.
Executive coaching provides a confidential space for leaders to explore these tensions and develop new approaches. Through coaching, executives learn to distinguish between healthy confidence and defensive ego, between decisive leadership and rigid thinking, between maintaining authority and exercising authentic influence.
One common coaching focus involves helping executives develop comfort with “not knowing.” In rapidly changing business environments, admitting uncertainty and engaging others in problem-solving often produces better outcomes than premature decisions based on incomplete information. This requires both intellectual and emotional development.
Coaching also addresses the practical aspects of demonstrating openness: how to ask questions that invite honest responses, how to receive difficult feedback constructively, how to admit mistakes without undermining confidence, and how to create forums where diverse perspectives can emerge and be integrated.
Creating Organisational Systems That Support Openness
Individual executive development must be supported by organisational systems that reinforce and reward open behaviours. This involves examining and often redesigning performance management processes, meeting structures, communication channels, and decision-making protocols.
Many organisations inadvertently punish openness through systems that reward individual heroics over collaborative problem-solving, that emphasise quarterly results over long-term learning, or that create competition between departments that should be collaborating. Executive coaching often expands to include organisational system design that aligns structures with stated values.
Successful executives also learn to create what Amy Edmondson calls “psychological safety”—the shared belief that teams can express ideas, concerns, and mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. This isn’t about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations; it’s about creating conditions where high standards can be achieved through collective intelligence rather than individual perfection.
The Ripple Effects of Executive Openness
When senior executives genuinely embrace openness, the organisational impact extends far beyond their direct reports. Middle managers begin modelling similar behaviours, front-line employees feel more empowered to contribute ideas and flag problems, and external stakeholders—customers, partners, investors—develop stronger relationships based on trust and mutual respect.
This cultural shift often unlocks innovation that was previously constrained by hierarchical information flows and risk-averse decision-making. Teams become more experimental, more willing to share partial ideas for collective development, and more capable of rapid learning from both successes and failures.
The external market impact can be equally significant. Organisations known for leadership openness often enjoy stronger brand reputations, more effective partnerships, and better relationships with regulatory bodies and community stakeholders.
Our comprehensive executive coaching programmes specifically address the development of organisational openness alongside traditional leadership competencies, recognising that tomorrow’s business challenges require leaders who can create cultures of learning, innovation, and collaborative excellence.
Measuring and Sustaining Organisational Openness
Developing organisational openness requires ongoing attention and measurement. Effective executives establish feedback mechanisms that provide honest assessment of cultural health: employee engagement surveys that probe psychological safety, 360-degree feedback processes that include openness behaviours, and customer feedback channels that reveal how internal culture impacts external relationships.
Sustainability requires embedding openness principles into core business processes. This might include innovation frameworks that expect experimentation and learning from failure, strategic planning processes that incorporate diverse scenarios and stakeholder perspectives, and leadership development programmes that emphasise collaborative capability alongside individual excellence.
Conclusion
The journey towards organisational openness isn’t always comfortable for executives who’ve built careers on having the right answers. Yet in today’s business landscape, the leaders who thrive are those who’ve learned that admitting “I don’t know” can be more powerful than pretending they do.
This shift from command-and-control to curiosity-and-collaboration doesn’t happen overnight. It takes genuine commitment to personal growth, willingness to examine long-held assumptions, and the patience to build new cultural norms that may initially feel unfamiliar or risky.
Over time, leaders who engage in this process find that openness transforms how they lead and how others respond to them. It invites trust, sparks collective intelligence, and turns uncertainty into a source of learning and innovation.
Executive coaching helps leaders connect growth with purpose. As openness deepens, so does the organisation’s capacity for innovation, collaboration, and meaningful impact.
Ready to develop the organisational openness that drives transformational leadership? Explore our executive coaching programmes designed for senior leaders.
Other recommended reading:
Harvard Business Review – “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace”
MIT Sloan Management Review – “Building a Learning Organization”
Research Gate – “The Benefits of Executive Coaching”
