Uncertainty is a pain. A lack of transparency makes it worse.

There’s too often a tendency, even with the best leaders, to look to the immediate for insights about how to fix what ails them and to lead better. The fact is, every generation has its timeless lessons, and for the 1980s, the Tylenol crisis stands above as a lesson worth relearning. In the fall of 1982, a to this day unidentified wrongdoer opened the then easily accessible bottles of the pain reliever and laced the capsules with cyanide, placing them back on store shelves for unsuspecting consumers to buy. Seven died. At the time of this tragedy, Tylenol was among the most trusted consumer products. Even so, in the earliest weeks of the crisis, the harm seemed near irreparable. 

The fact is, in such circumstances, most senior leaders look to distance themselves, or to blame or bury the bad news. The leadership at Tylenol and its parent company, Johnson & Johnson, chose a different path. In a word, they chose transparency. 

The underappreciated power of transparency

For all the fears around embracing it, transparency is a powerful tool. Wielding it impactfully begins deeper, a fact J&J clearly understood. As uncertain and ambiguous as the crisis was, what mattered to the company and its leadership was not. For them, public safety trumped profit. More than simply declaring this, the very first thing they did was to immediately recall all products with any risk of exposure. It was a move with substantial economic consequences, one that would give any leader pause. 

But J&J wasn’t done. From the start, they proactively told the public what they were doing. More importantly, they told them why. Instead of bunkering against them, the company chose to bring customers and the public at large into the predicament and the response. From keeping the public informed about the tampering incident to telling the public about the changes they were making to ensure it never happened again, openness became their way. 

Other leaders in other companies quietly questioned the move. It just didn’t fit the public crisis playbook. The initial and significant financial hit J&J took appeared to prove those other leaders right. But here’s what was underestimated. By being so transparent, customers stayed, or quickly came back. Why? The primary reason is that transparency translates to trust of the highest form, trust not just when things are going well, but more importantly, when they’re not. 

In the worst moment, J&J told the truth. They doubled down on their commitment to safety over profit, too, not just by the single act of pulling product, but by reinventing packaging to become both tamper-proof and the new industry standard. By such moves, not once but ongoing, Tylenol quickly regained its market dominance, and J&J’s handling of the crisis became a case study in leadership in uncertainty. While there are many lessons in this story, the central lesson is the power of transparency – a power even greater than what the Tylenol story tells.

Time and again, research shows that transparency improves decision-making. It makes everyone better informed, raising the odds of making faster, better decisions. The openness inherent in transparency fosters greater collaboration, too. Such advantages feed other wins, among them more frequent and more impactful innovation and higher resilience thresholds. Hidden strengths within teams are revealed in a transparent environment as well. Relationships prove stronger. In combination, such advantages foster agility and leverage or neutralize volatility. 

Forgetting the lesson, when it’s needed most

Truth be told, being transparent isn’t often a leader’s first inclination. Transparency is messy, something leaders don’t like. Messy takes time. Messy calls out imperfection. Yet, the completeness transparency demands, that is, the good and the bad and the truth about how they impact each other, is the very thing that enables trust. 

You’d think that the arguments for transparent leadership would be robust enough for senior leaders everywhere to embrace it. And yet, they don’t. Indeed, lack of leadership transparency seems to be growing of late. As one point of proof, the recruitment and career advice company LiveCareer’s 2025 Trust Deficit Report showed a sharp lack of confidence not just in certain areas but across nearly every aspect of work, from hiring and performance reviews to collaboration and leadership. It was true across sectors, too. And the root of the decline, according to the study, was an all-encompassing question among employees about whether those who led them and even their fellow workers were acting in good faith.

Read that last line again. The impact of a lack of transparency has grown beyond any one incident or circumstance to become cultural. That’s the bad news. But if you look closely, you’ll see there’s good news as well. Rather than a conclusion, the lack of trust is an open question. If you’re a senior leader, your question is: How will you answer? In the new year, consider gifting yourself a little pain relief by applying a well-proven lesson to a new era hungry for clarity.

Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.

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