The following is a guest post by Michael Paull, CFO of The Ahola Corporation. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

Do your marketing teams discuss EBITDA in the break room? Have you heard HR and IT talking about last quarter's margins? Do operations managers stop by your office to ask about revenue forecasts? If so, congratulations—you have built a team that is engaged, informed, and proud of its transparency. This transparency itself is a strategic advantage. Such an environment often directly leads to improved performance.

From Confidentiality to Transparency: The Shift in Sharing Financial Information

For many financial leaders, financial transparency is a challenging topic. Historically, financial performance has been tightly controlled by finance teams and senior management. Such information has often been considered confidential and not meant for general employees. "Why would they need this data?" "They wouldn't understand it anyway" were common refrains in the past.

Other reasons financial leaders are cautious about transparency include fear of inviting unnecessary scrutiny, or simply feeling it challenges their authority. Concerns about power, control, and even personal identity often come into play. As societal transparency accelerates and permeates every aspect of our lives, this concept has taken root in companies large and small. Even publicly traded companies, whose financial data is fully public, are sharing more granular financial information with their teams. It is essential for financial leaders to recognize that sharing certain financial data with employees can yield tangible benefits. So, what are these benefits and associated risks? Equally important, what should be shared?

Trust is the Starting Point

It all begins with trust. When a CFO can stand up at an all-hands meeting and present financial results, trust is naturally built. By sharing information that is highly significant and often considered confidential, employees typically appreciate it. They feel included, trusted, and privy to such critical information, which goes a long way toward getting them to buy into your plans and fostering a legitimate sense of belonging and ownership. As a company leader, you are essentially informing them of the direct results of their own efforts.

Strategic Sharing: From Data to Action

Once you have shared this information, the next step is to guide your team in understanding it. Help employees build the connection between their work and the company's financial performance. How do their individual and collective efforts impact these results? What can they do to move the numbers? If you have an engaged and well-matched workforce, they will actively seek this insight. How an individual impacts the overall result is not always straightforward. As a leader, you need to establish this line of sight. Presenting this data must include a call to action. Otherwise, no matter how interesting the data, it won't help you, your company, or your employees.

Sharing financial data with your team also helps promote goal alignment. While the management team may be aligned, employees don't always know the company's goals and vision. Sharing this data communicates and reinforces what the management team values, and these are things that should equally matter to everyone. Cascading and consistent messaging can greatly assist you in this critical area.

When employees have this information, as long as incentives are properly aligned with desired outcomes, they will undoubtedly make better decisions. Once they see what matters and how they can drive change, the situation becomes empowering. Employees begin to think like owners, truly focused on the bigger picture. Not only will some employees become more strategic, but they may also discover tactical improvements in their daily work. This can drive efficiency and reduce costs. Ultimately, what we seek is better company performance. And a well-performing company should be capable of offering employees more attractive compensation and benefits packages. This is a virtuous cycle we all want to be part of.

Risks Are Manageable: Transparency Is Not Without Cost

This initiative is not entirely without risk, but you can largely control it by carefully choosing what to share. Ultimately, it's important to remember that certain data may be disclosed outside the company. Confidentiality agreements aside, this is an unavoidable reality.

Additionally, some employees may not like what they hear and choose to leave the company. This is certainly a risk, but it also provides an opportunity to reassign responsibilities or bring in more suitable people. While most companies welcome a certain degree of healthy and constructive disagreement, you do want everyone to be aligned to some extent on the goals and the path to achieving them. Ultimately, I believe you will find that the benefits of sharing outweigh the risks, making it a strategy worth pursuing.

Determining Key Metrics: What to Share and How

Now that you've determined this is the right direction, what should you share? In the absence of facts, people tend to fabricate their own narratives. You need to share enough information to avoid this, but you don't want to overshare. Oversharing can obscure what truly matters, and you should be able to communicate concisely and accurately with a few metrics. Core metrics such as revenue and margins should be standard. Comparing these metrics to budget and prior-year results provides appropriate context for better understanding.

Some companies may share EBITDA and cash flow metrics. This can be challenging because once you start sharing certain metrics, there is often an expectation of continued transparency. If numbers are trending poorly and you're worried about alarming employees, damaging culture, or exacerbating a difficult situation, you might be tempted to stop sharing. This is a mistake—it sends exactly the signal you want to avoid: things are not going well, you might have cash flow issues, or other problems that could lead to layoffs. Worse, trust will be eroded.

Before deciding what to share, make sure you have committed to the entire process, through good times and bad. After all, the mission here is to build a more cohesive and fully engaged workforce. Who better than your team to help you solve problems? Other reportable metrics might include pipeline data, or production and utilization metrics.

What matters is sharing meaningful data—data that tells a story, can be understood, and drives the desired actions. This data should be a subset of what management uses internally or for board and investor reporting. It should not be a new set of metrics disconnected from what you currently use. Know the score, report the score, and the score will improve—this is a maxim worth remembering.

The frequency of sharing this information depends on your company, but at least monthly is recommended. You need to measure and report changes often enough so the team can see the impact of their actions. Some companies have a culture of real-time feedback. I have worked at companies where monitors were placed throughout the office, continuously displaying key metrics at both department and company levels. This may require some experimentation, but you will find the right cadence in time.

In today's competitive and rapidly changing environment, financial transparency is not just a leadership preference; it is a strategic necessity. When CFOs share the right data with consistency and clear context, they can drive alignment, build accountability, and inspire informed action across the organization. The risks are real, but they are also manageable.

With thoughtful execution, the impact can be transformative. Transparency fosters a more engaged workforce, enables better decisions, and creates a culture where financial success is understood and shared. Finance no longer operates from the periphery but leads from the center of the business.