Should your company's financial targets be transparent?

Key Takeaway: Hiding financial targets undermines every claim you make about transparency. Teams that can't see whether the company is on track can't help you get there. If sharing the exact numbers feels too risky, share the relative version (percent growth, percent of target hit) instead. At your next leadership meeting, decide which financial KPIs you'll surface to the whole team and pick a format that gives them context without exposing what genuinely needs to stay private.

Most leaders I talk to agree, in principle, that company goals should be transparent. They'll happily share the strategy. They'll publish the OKRs. They'll display the team-level KPI dashboards on a screen in the office.

And then we get to financial targets, and the same leaders get visibly uncomfortable.

This is one of the most common gaps I see between what companies say about transparency and what they actually practice. The strategy can be public, but the revenue target is need-to-know. The OKRs can be visible to the whole company, but the gross margin number lives only on a slide in the CFO's deck. The result is a half-transparent culture that the people inside the company immediately see through.

In my experience, there's a much better way. And it doesn't require sharing every line of your P&L.

Why hiding financial targets quietly hurts you

The instinct to keep financial numbers private usually comes from a good place. Leaders worry that employees will leak numbers to competitors, get demoralized by missed targets, or misinterpret the data. Some of those concerns are real. Most of them are overstated.

Here's what tends to actually happen when financial targets are hidden:

• The "we're all in this together" message stops being credible. Teams notice when the company asks for stretch effort but won't share whether the company is on track. Trust erodes quietly.
• People lose context for their own work. A Sales rep who doesn't know the company's revenue target is operating in the dark on what "good" actually means for the business. So is a Product team whose roadmap depends on the company hitting growth numbers it can't see.
• Decisions get made in isolation. Without visibility into financial reality, mid-level managers either over-invest in initiatives that don't fit the company's actual constraints, or hold back on bets the company actually could afford.
• Rumors fill the vacuum. When numbers are hidden, employees make up their own version of the financial picture. The made-up version is almost always more dramatic than reality, in either direction.

Research on open-book management from the National Center for Employee Ownership found that companies that share financial information with their employees saw an increase in sales of 1.66% per year and employment of 1.27% per year compared to companies that didn't, with employee-owned companies seeing even larger lifts. These aren't huge numbers in isolation, but compounded over years, they make a real difference. And they reflect a broader pattern: when employees understand the financial reality of the business, they make better decisions in service of it.

The simple workaround for sensitive numbers

The good news is, you don't have to choose between full transparency and hiding everything. There's a middle path that gets you almost all the benefit without exposing the data that genuinely needs to stay private.

If you're not comfortable sharing exact financial targets in absolute numbers, share them as relative values.

Instead of "Q3 revenue target: $14.2M," share "Q3 revenue target: 23% growth over Q2."

Instead of "Annual ARR goal: $52M," share "Annual ARR goal: 40% growth over last year."

Instead of "Net profit margin: 18%," share "Improving net profit margin by 4 percentage points over the year."

This approach gives your team everything they actually need:

• Direction. Everyone can see what the company is trying to achieve.
• Pace. Everyone can see whether progress is on track, ahead, or behind.
• Context. Everyone can connect their daily work to whether the company is winning or losing.

What it doesn't give: the exact absolute numbers that you might genuinely worry about leaking to a competitor, an investor, or a former employee.

I've seen this format work across companies of every size. The team feels included. The data stays appropriate. And leadership stops having to navigate the awkward gap between preaching transparency and practicing selective disclosure.

Where financial targets belong in your OKR system

Financial targets are usually KPIs, not OKRs. Revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, ARR, cash runway — these are the metrics that need to stay healthy day to day. They live on dashboards. They get tracked continuously. They're maintenance metrics.

OKRs, by contrast, are change goals. They're the things you're trying to move beyond their current baseline. Sometimes a financial outcome is the Key Result. "Grow ARR from $24M to $32M by Q4" is a legitimate Key Result if hitting that growth requires specific change initiatives this quarter. But more often, the financial number is the KPI you want to influence, and the OKR is the change that should move it.

For more on this distinction, we've covered why companies can't run on KPIs alone and the difference between Metrics, KPIs, and Key Results. The short version: financial metrics belong as KPIs in your system. Whether or not they appear in OKRs depends on whether they're the thing you're actively trying to change this cycle.

Either way, the transparency question is the same. If your team can see the strategy and the OKRs but not the financial KPIs the company is being measured against, you've created a blind spot that undermines the rest of the system.

What you should think carefully about not sharing

To be fair, there are some financial details that genuinely should stay limited. Specifically:

• Individual compensation data. Personal pay, equity grants, severance packages.
• Customer-specific revenue. Contract values for individual customers, especially if you're under NDA.
• Vendor and supplier costs. Pricing you've negotiated that could harm your position if leaked.
• Pre-announcement M&A or fundraising data. Anything market-moving or that triggers disclosure obligations.

Everything else, in my experience, is fair game to share at least at a directional level. Company revenue, growth rates, key margins, runway position, fundraising plans (after they're public), expense ratios. The list of "absolutely must stay private" tends to be much shorter than leaders' first instinct suggests.

The honesty test

If you want to know whether your company has a transparency gap around financial targets, here's a quick diagnostic.

Pick a mid-level employee at random and ask them 3 questions:

1. What is the company's primary financial goal this year?
2. Are we on track to hit it?
3. How does your team's work connect to that goal?

If the answers are clear, you've earned the right to call yourself a transparent company.

If they're vague, contradictory, or "I think we're doing fine but I'm not really sure," you have a transparency gap. Closing it doesn't require sharing your full P&L. It requires picking which numbers matter most, deciding what format (absolute or relative) feels right, and making sure those numbers are visible everywhere strategy and OKRs are visible.

The concrete move for this week

At your next leadership team meeting, do one specific thing.

Take 15 minutes to decide which financial KPIs you'll surface to the whole company, and in what format. Pick 3 to 5 of them. For each one, decide whether you'll share it in absolute numbers (e.g., "$24M ARR") or relative numbers (e.g., "40% growth"). Then commit to making them visible alongside your strategy and OKRs, with the same cadence and the same prominence.

It's a small decision that takes one meeting to make. But it closes one of the most common credibility gaps between what companies say about transparency and what they actually do. And it tends to be the kind of move that mid-level employees notice immediately, in a good way.